1. Beginning Astrophotography—Final Wrap up
Geoff Smith, October 2018
Note: the original presentation contained some videos. These have been deleted in this version

2. Important points
The mount is crucial. Without a good mount you will always struggle to get good pictures
Focus very, very carefully. The easiest way to ruin a promising picture is to have poor focus.
You should aim for the longest total exposure that time will allow.
Select targets appropriate to your equipment—FOV, aperture

3. Workflow: Acquiring your image
Start with your polar aligned mount
Connect all equipment—telescope to mount, camera to telescope, guide camera etc
Acquire your object—hand paddle, planetarium program, setting circles or star hop.
Focus—Bahtinov mask, software aided
Set the exposure parameters—exposure length, number of frames, filter
Start autoguiding
Take the image

4. Calibration frames
Acquire dark frames and bias frames on cloudy nights
Acquire flat frames before you dismantle your equipment

5. Software for Image Acquisition
Many astro cameras come with their own acquisition software
Atik, SBIG, FLI, Starlight Xpress
Some third party software for DSLR
ImagesPlus, BackyardEOS, MaximDSLR
However, people often use a software package that is not camera specific
Nebulosity, MaximDL, Astroart, Sequence Generator Pro (SGP)
Nebulosity is a good beginner choice—simple to use, versatile, cheap (US$95). SGP is also highly recommended (US$99).

6. Preprocessing Calibrate your images, using suitable software.
Stack and align images using suitable software

7. Image Processing—What does it involve?
Adjustment of brightness. Typical images straight off the camera are very dark.
Channel combination of Red, Green and Blue stacked images
Colour adjustment
Gradient removal
Noise reduction
Sharpening
Contrast levels
Crop

8. Image processing software
One-stop shops that begin with light frames and calibration frames and end with a fully processed image.
PixInsight
CCDStack
Astroart
Software that needs some support to bring in your calibrated images
Photoshop: Can’t calibrate, stack, deconvolve or work with linear images
Startools: Can’t calibrate and stack

9. A word on Photoshop
Photoshop was for a long time the software of choice for astrophotography processing, simply because there was no reasonable alternative.
Photoshop has not been conceived or designed to solve the kind of problems that arise in astrophotography.
Photoshop is a general-purpose image editing application. It is excellent for image edition and retouching.
Photoshop is being applied to astrophotography through tricky procedures, including arbitrary manual manipulations, hand- painted masks, arbitrary manual selections, retouching, unrigorous layering techniques and other 'magical recipes’.
Advice: Use dedicated astrophotography processing software

10. Other possibilities for astrophotography
Video capture
Time lapse

11. Video capture
Cheap : <$200 for standard webcam plus fittings to attach to telescope.
On solar system objects, they outperform dedicated astrocameras costing many thousands of dollars
Easy to use
Use a Barlow lens to get magnification (f/25)
The idea is to select the best thousand or so frames (using software) and then stack them

13. Software for video stacking
Autostakkert! Free
RegiStax Free
Firecapture Free, but donations accepted

14. Saturn video
Deleted

15. Saturn

16. Jupiter

17. Clavius

18. Time lapse
Here we take multiple still photos and combine them into a video.

19. Video deleted

20. Remember: No problem is insurmountable