[Xerte-dev] Seeing Stars

[Julian Tenney]

Hi,

I thought I'd share a couple of pictures I took of the stars whilst on holiday. We were staying in the south of France, about 35km SW of Carcassonne, and the sky was very dark at night in the second week after the moon had disappeared from the night sky. The images were made by taking a series of about 20 photographs (Nikon 7000D, 18mm lens, 20 seconds, F3.5, ISO 6400) and then running the entire set through a  piece of software called Deep Sky Stacker. What this does is uses the information in each image to identify, and remove, the noise, resulting in a very clear image, which it spits out as a 32bit TIF, about 250MB. Then a little Photoshop to increase the contrast a little and stretch the histogram, and that's pretty much it. If anyone is nifty with Photoshop and wants to have a crack at some post-processing on the TIFs let me know and I'll put them somewhere you can get them (I don't have them with me today), be interesting to see what others can do with them! These are from the same TIFF, the top one has a bit more Photoshop going on, I have another TIFF where the stars are sharper, because a) I focused the camera properly (!) and b) I took more images, and used dark frames as well as light frames in the stacker.

[cid:image001.jpg at 01CEAA30.F9B11FD0]

[cid:image002.jpg at 01CEAA30.F9B11FD0]
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