Acquisition
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For 2024, I made the switch to a mono camera for galaxies. I have added a focal reducer to the Edge 11" and that seems to be able to pull in more of the faint light. Most of this past year was spent tweaking the imaging train, but early results are quite good. I am catching up now on processing some of the data taken with this new setup and will post shortly..
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For nebula, I will continue to use the TS Optics 130mm APO. I learned that the imaging train used on the Edge does not work on the refractor. I should have done that first, so a lot of time went into figuring out what spacers gave me a flat field. I have it down to within a few millimeters now and need to catch up on some data processing.
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My imaging spot is a short drive from my house, so both systems need to be mobile. I had a number of weird things fail on me this year and had to reach deep into my bag of backup supplies. This has been a good learning experience on bringing along redundancies for pretty much everything.
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Continuing the theme of change everything all at once (not the best strategy), I also replaced my guidescope this year. This helped improve the guiding on the refractor but I will need to rebalance the Edge again. Winter is here so I will have plenty of cloudy nights to work on it..
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Image Processing
Alignment/Stacking - I preprocess darks and flats in Nebulosity, which allows me to process RGB, Ha and OIII simultaneously. I use ImagesPlus for grading and IP's HDR algorithm for stacking. I tested a number of different stacking routines during covid and ImagesPlus HDR is by far the best.
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Deconvolution - I will admit to being rather skeptical of anything AI, but Seti Astro recently released and AI-enabled sharpening routine that is.. well.. it's quite good. So I have been sharpening the RG and B stacked images before combining them into a final color image.
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Post processing - The bulk of my post processing is done in Photoshop. It has taken me years to feel comfortable in this program, but I finally have a reasonable workflow. I'm still learning new tricks all the time from more experienced processors like Craig Stocks.
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Synthetic Luminance - Simply because of the light pollution in my area, I tend not to take separate luminance frames. There has been lots of debate on this, but I have found the best results come from extracting the luminance from the RGB and recombining it with the RGB data.
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The one lesson I have learned is to not try to do too much with each step. Each layer is a tiny incremental improvement. When I try to do too much with any step, it ends up looking more like a painting than a photo. Baby steps.
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