Author:  Jerry Lodriguss
The Beginner's Guide to Astronomical Image Processing will teach you how to process your long-exposure deepsky images to produce beautiful results.
Taking the image is just the first half of the job. Processing the image is the other half.
DeepSkyStacker
Taking the image is just the first half of the job. Processing the image is the other half.
- Stack the images - When you shoot deepsky objects, you will usually shoot multiple frames and "stack" them to improve the all-important signal-to-noise ratio in the image. You don't want to do this manually, so we will use DeepSkyStacker to do it automatically.
- Process the images - Processing takes your original raw data and enhances the brightness, contrast, and color, to make faint deepsky objects more visible as well as correcting for things such as the ugly red color of the sky from light pollution, and vignetting and sky gradients.
DeepSkyStacker
- Automatic calibration with dark, flat and bias frames if you have them.
- Automatic alignment and registration.
- Automatic stacking to combine multiple short images to equal the signal-to-noise ratio of a much longer image.
- Remove light pollution to produce correct color.
- Brighten the image to make faint details more visible.
- Increase the contrast to make faint objects stand out from the background.
- Adjust and enhance the color.
- Correct:
- Hot pixels
- Dust spots
- Minor trailing
- Vignetting
- Gradients