of them everywhere so thanks for sending this in and congrats on your progress okay and then we have nikolas nikolas said that they had trouble with star reduction because star net plus plus didn't cleanly remove the stars um so the way that i use star net plus plus it doesn't really matter if it cleanly removes the stars or not um and i found the same thing with with your data um let me just show you what i mean here with the process your data here so if i go down here to the starless layer you can see it did not cleanly remove the stars there's a lot of artifacting over here and over here um and it's even more clear when i corrected the color balance but when i add the star layer back in it doesn't matter because it covers this star layer covers up all of that artifacts completely because i don't do any kind of star reduction on the star layer and then i just do a final uh black point reset here and i think that looks really nice so i think your data looks really good really clean so i would just uh process it more simply i guess and uh and i think you'll be happy with it okay and then we have nico with two k's and nico sent in a photo of andromeda shot with a canon dslr a vintage takumar 200 millimeter lens and a star adventurer um and nico was having difficulty bringing out any color variety in andromeda so let me show some of my tricks in photoshop here okay okay we're starting with the starless image not a huge amount of color variety but then we're gonna make it sort of blue it makes the background blue too that's okay we then take a curves layer this is just global adjustments and we um reset the blot the blue point the blue uh black point but then we've we've blew it up the blew it up the galaxy a little bit then we can increase saturation on the galaxy a little bit um we're gonna add the stars back reset the black point again and then this is just a uh luminance mask so i just basically made a copy from visible and then turned it black and white with image adjustments um let me find that here image adjustments black and white filter then i copy this um black and white luminance mask onto here onto a the mask for a hue slash saturation layer then i turn this off so now this hue slash saturation layer is affecting everything below and then i just increased the saturation on the bright parts of the image and so that's how i got more color variety into your andromeda shot uh hopefully you could follow that uh and and hopefully also it's a little bit more simple than maybe what i showed in the andromeda video which watching watching it back i think i i go through too many steps and masks and things and this is hopefully a little simpler all right next we have nyx shutter nyx shutter or is it maybe is nyx shutter um anyways they shot the ophiuchus region untracked with a canon 200d and a 50 millimeter lens and they asked to see what i could do with their linear tiff file so here's what i came up with i think it's a bit noisier than their image so uh i don't think i did any noise reduction on it yet so if you wanted to do some noise reduction let's just open up camera raw filter and uh apply some here how much something like that i don't know if it made much change but anyways um my goal with uh processing your tiff file was just to capture the whole of what you of what you got here so i really like how these dark streamers look um and then the row fuke down here in that corner so i'm not sure why you cut that off but uh but i like it so that's maybe just because it was sort of a noisy part of the image um but you know i think it looks really cool um it's you know for an untracked shot at 50 millimeters um the way to make this better is of course just to capture more data um but all the dark nebula in this shot is what makes it so neat so that's from uh nyx shutter and then next here we have from nils and nils sent this image of the cygnus wall region um you know in part of the north america nebula and cygnus is taken with a nicon dslr an opt along elix stream filter and a sky watcher refractor and mount nils mentioned not being sure how to handle the color with the elix stream filter and was wondering if i thought the photo was too red so i think leaving the nebula very red like this is closer to a natural representation of it in the sense that if you took a long photo of this nebula with a modified camera it would come out very red um an elix stream filter is a dual narrow band filter though so if you want to play around with sort of narrow band techniques what you can do is you can separate the uh red channel from the green and blue channel so for instance if i look at here if i just click on this and then i look at the channels you can see there's the green channel uh so it's there's a lot of stuff going on in green but you can see the red channel is so much brighter so to equalize these a little bit what i can do is i can copy this green channel put it here and change it from normal to screen and then we have this so that already looks sort of interesting but then what i'm going to do is i'm going to colorize this layer this is with a hue saturation layer set to colorize and set to you know a blue green so this is to get a sort of natural representation if you wanted to make it more of a fantasy representation you can do a deeper blue it's up to you um how you know where you want to put this an actual really natural representation might look like that but i think that's pretty ugly so i'm going to do somewhere in between anyways then i'm just going to reset the black point with some curves and call it a day and so that's an easy way to bring out more color variety is just take the green or blue channel right from the data put it here as a screen blend colorize it and do some curves there's other ways you can of course do this but this is one way now this does have some downsides you can see it brought out some of this blue noise up here so you might want to crop and you might want to do noise reduction on this layer different things but this is the basic uh workflow next up we have noa who shot the pelican nebula with a small newtonian reflector and opt along ellen hands filter and a canon dslr and um my critique here will be sort of similar to the last one and that the ellen hands like the elix stream is a dual narrowband filter meaning it picks up oh three data in the blue green spectrum and ha data in the red spectrum so usually the way to get the most colors you separate the channels stretch them independently map them that kind of thing in this photo i feel like it all looks pretty orange so i don't see a lot of color separation noa noted they did use a palette uh a defined palette one by another astrophotographer named forax fora xx um i don't know how you stretch the channels before using the palette but it's just it's uh like i said there's just not a lot of color separation which is what i usually go for rather than this more sort of monochromatic uh look um so just to give you an idea of how i might do it um here's sort of my processing style i guess um so i started here with just your red channel applied a red coloration to it then i took your green and blue channel combined them and put that on as a screen blend and then colored that to taste so i did 216 on the hue thing here and then i used a selective color layer to intensify the reds even a little bit more um give them even a little bit more separation from this uh you know there's these blues and pinks out here and uh and then dropped the black point a bit back down i think i may be alone a little too far there i think something like that might be better um but that gives you an idea of how i approached it um it's a little bit more uh crazy maybe than your editing which feels very restrained um uh so maybe somewhere in between what i'm doing here and what you're doing here might be good um okay and then the other thing i'll say is you know i like working with uh picks inside i mean Photoshop for this because um it's just so easy to play around with color palettes when you can just have complete control over uh it and then see immediately what you're what you're doing when you set it to like that color versus that color whatever um while in picks insight it's like if you use pixel math it's sort of like you you put in a formula you you have to wait a few seconds then you see the result it just takes it's just not as fun um so i like Photoshop for this kind of thing okay another Pelican Nebula uh this is Ophir Ophir uh took this with the elix stream filter pretty similar uh to what we did last uh here and um but this was done within this spree 120 telescope and uh Ophir said the way they do the color uh is they unlink the channels and apply an stf auto stretch to get two colors that they like um but this was their first time doing so with an elix stream filter and was surprised by how much orange came out uh so i guess the reason for this is with an unlinked stretch it'll basically try to equalize the red green and blue channels as much as it can so since the elix stream filter is made up of just these two tiny parts of the spectrum in teal green and red uh when you put that together i guess you get this sort of orange uh luck uh orange and neutral sort of white almost very pale blue i guess so i won't go over this again because i just sort of went over it with the same uh object here but when i work with uh these dual narrowband filters i like doing it this way having more control in photoshop um but you know for uh uh not having much control just doing it with an auto stretch i actually think this looks pretty good um partly i think because you captured a lot of cool detail in the in the dark uh nebulae here uh with uh your spree 120 which is a nice big refractor so thanks for sending that one in of fear and then we have a win and this is a picture of the trifid nebulae nebulae sorry uh with his university's uh 32 inch richie criden telescope and an s big uh ccd camera and it was 15 three minutes subs each with red green and blue filters and i want to ask about the color balancing you know i think it looks pretty good the trifid and natural color should have this sort of pinkish uh red to represent the h beta um and the then there's the reflection nebulae down here and it's interacting with an hl for signal um and you it looks like your star color variety is nice um one thing i'd change in processing here is just uh the crop i think when you're this close to it being centered i think it's just gonna look better uh centered and i don't see really anything interesting over there so i would just do that um but that's really it i think uh you know i don't have that much experience with a 32 inch scope so i don't know if this is critical sharpness the stars like look a little uh bloated but that might just because you're battling you know seeing conditions and all that you know because the because the details in the nebulae do look pretty sharp so all right and this is by pascal pascal sent a single exposure of the milky way taken with a sony camera and a wide angle lens um i have a couple suggestions one is with a single wide angle shot like this it can be nice to include a bit more of the foreground you have a little bit of a roof here but i think i'd appreciate even more like if you turned your camera vertical if that's possible on your tripod if you could get more of like the horizon uh i think that would look cool um and then my second uh thought is that it's very blue uh i don't know if that was intentional um i i tried with the jpeg to maybe go back go to a sort of more neutral color balance here with more star variety color paulinho c88 shot the milky way core with the canon xti dslr and a canon nifty 50 lens wide open at f1.8 and this was all on a celestron alt as mount and they also use some custom programs on a raspberry pi computer to control everything and paulinho c88 mentioned that the chromatic aberration and the vignetting were likely a result of the lens and yes i can confirm with this nifty 50 wide open um this is the best performance to expect in terms of star distortion um and i think it looks pretty good uh for this lens so well processed with serial and gimp uh paulinho c88 did mention this glow in the bottom right here and was wondering if i knew what it is to me it just looks like a stacking artifact um you know i can sort of see it here too uh probably a rotational artifact since you're using an alt as mount so as the um night progresses it's rotating the frame slightly and uh you can see that down there now why can't we see it up here uh i'm not sure i think i can see a sort of red line right there so i think the whole frame is rotating and it's just clearer clearer down here so you know what i would do with that kind of thing is just uh lose about whatever 30 20 of the picture and get rid of that because i think as long as you still have sort of the key things you're going for i think it's it's fine and you still have the lagoon and trifid centered if you sort of crop in on all directions okay and here is from peter or petar i'm not sure which pronunciation but petar sent in an image of the eagle nebula um taken with narrowband filters and a mono camera and he said the thing that they struggled with the most was the color mix uh being new to narrowband i played around with the data that you sent in and you know i didn't get anything radically different or better uh than you got here i think that it's just that h o o hydrogen and oxygen only is sort of unsatisfying on this target since the pillars of creation shot uh literally invented the Hubble palette which is this more gold green and blue look um and we we can only achieve that once we have separation with the sulfur data too so i think that that's just becomes so iconic that this with this object that it's hard to feel like that it's finished at this more subtle h o o palette even though it's still quite beautiful um you know we could we could go further with making this blue but i tried that and it didn't look really quite right um so i think you did a really fine job here with very nice details and uh well controlled stars and a very nice field okay and then we have peter h um different peter sent in this image of the signus loop supernova remnant and it was captured with a nikon dslr a zoom lens and a sky watcher star adventurer tracker and the nebulae came out really well in your rendition here um lots of fine details the difficult part with this region is always how to handle that star field um since it's so dense and packed with stars it can overwhelm the photo and then you also have the noise from the dslr to deal with um which makes it extra difficult so here's my attempt um i think compared to yours i sacrifice star color a bit um to get a slightly cleaner result um in the background a little bit more uniform and free of color noise um and then the other thing i did is i just felt your crop felt a little bit cramped so i just opened it up a little bit uh in the corners here okay next we have prashant and prashant sent in an image of the marcarion's chain of galaxies this was taken with a 107 millimeter refractor a qhy 268m and lrgb filters uh so this is excellent framing uh you know i like that prashant was able to fit it in like this looks really cool and uh i think that you know with with a wide view like this you you want to try to be able to see differences between these all these little galaxies and that's hard to do because you're you're so far zoomed out so you really have to push things like saturation and contrast and things like that uh to make them stand out now of course that's a trade-off because when you when you really zoom in on them if you've really pushed saturation then you get sort of uh things where it's like that's just blown you know it's just a pink blob around an orange blob uh you know same thing over here if we really zoom in there's just like blown details but those those details actually look much better than not pushing them as hard when you're zoomed out like this so i think that prashant you know hit a good balance here by pushing the saturation so hard on an image like this because i'm often not satisfied when i look at marcarion's chain and i don't know wide field and it just looks sort of boring and this doesn't so i think the only the only way to make it better uh would be to shoot with an even bigger telescope like a mirror a mirrored telescope and um and then do a mosaic of this region but that's a lot of work so i think uh this is the best you can do with with a wide field refractor like he has okay and then we have pratulia and pratulia sent an image of a ryan and part of monoceros um shot untracked with a nikon mirrorless camera and a lens at 42 millimeter focal length and pratulia stacked in deep sky stacker extracted the background gradient and serial and stretched in photoshop i like it uh it's a very nice composition and uh you brought out the the interesting dark nebula structures up here um though the only thing i think is a little funky is over here on the right hand side you're getting some stacking artifacts i think so i might chop that off um huge sort of my rendition where i chopped that off and just added a bit more contrast and saturation uh compared to your rendition but i think that yours is definitely on the right track and looks it looks really nice uh so well done so it's a balancing act with wide field shots like this to you know control the star field bring out what you want to bring out and also work on the the noise and everything that comes with that with shooting untracked randall sent an image of milky way shot with a nikon dslr and an 18 to 55 kit lens on a star tracker and randall stacked 31 minute exposures with sequitur and then color corrected in photoshop and i think your color correction looks very good uh one thing i'm a little confused of was this little white line here next to this bright star i didn't see it in your stacked tiff file that you sent so i'm not sure what caused that it looks sort of like it could have been a satellite trail but then usually stacking with you know a rejection algorithm will get rid of those so i'm not sure what that is randall said that he struggled with how much noise there is and how many stars there are which are both common problems with milky way shooting um i wouldn't worry about noise too much with this image as it's not super visible when you look at the whole photo like this um the only thing i'd maybe do is just reduce the green noise a little bit photoshop you can just sort of bring it down a little bit like that um some you know ways to try reducing noise are to take temperature matched dark frames but the best way is just take more total frames uh more total photos so if you did 30 minutes uh if you do two hours the signal to noise will be twice as good and you won't notice the noise as much um in terms of the stars i i really like how your image looks with all the stars but i'll just show you a way to reduce the appearance of the stars which is different than a traditional star reduction method so i took your file i applied star net plus plus to it i then put the original image back on top set it to a screen blend mode and at first it will look no different but then if i just want to um reduce the appearance of the stars i can literally just take the opacity of that stars layer and play around with it a little bit to make them a little bit dimmer in the overall picture and i think for a milky way shot this works uh pretty well which is just to reduce the stars with opacity and a screen blend okay ray sent an image of the milky way shot with a candidia solar and kit lens on a tripod it's 45 shots at 13 seconds each from a green zone meaning green on the map in terms of light pollution it was processed in light room with selective color masks and ray asked about how uh would flats and darks have helped maybe a bit i don't honestly see you know there's a bit of vignetting up here maybe flats could have helped with that there's probably hot pixels in there but for a wide shot i don't know if it really matters uh if there's a couple hot pixels so there'll probably be some benefit but i often skip them for my milky way shots too um my main critique your shot is i think it's just a little bit over processed um with the saturation and the and the colors um uh but this is of course a more of a personal preference thing but i would have processed it a little bit more like this just to get the natural color of the milky way um it's more your yours is more of like a um a fantasy look i guess it's sort of this like blue and pink uh and then this is more of like a you know a naturalistic look i guess um so not quite as pretty uh so i could go either way but that's sort of uh if you wanted to see what it looked like with more the natural color of the milky way this is sort of the direction to go okay and then remiss remiss sent an image of the bubble nebula region in seafious i think this looks very good in terms of capture and processing uh for some reason when i started to process your tiffed i'm getting really weird banding i'm not sure if you're seeing that on your end when processing if you are try to get to the bottom of it it could be like a power supply issue uh with the camera or try a different gain setting if you aren't seeing that banding then just ignore this because it's i don't really see it in the end result that you have here so maybe something went wrong with the tiff file you sent i'm not sure um in terms of what else to try with this i try separating out the color channels to mono and um that's easy to do with uh a button in pics insight and you might be able to pull out some more separation of the ha and the o3 but honestly this this region is pretty ha dominant so this mostly red luck is mostly what i've seen for this uh region of the sky there there is more o3 in the lobster claw here but you've only caught sort of the part of it but the o3 you do have in the lobster claw is looking sort of green i i think i prefer more of a blue o3 so i just changed it here just to show you what that looks like so here's green we'll zoom in and then if i change it to like a little bit more of a blue looks like that um but there's not a lot of like i said there's not a huge amount of o3 in this in this region so i think this looks uh pretty good okay rendon says this was their first attempt at an ha rgb image and it's of the satyr butterfly um it's processed with pics insight followed by photoshop and rendon says their issue with the image is the dark circles around the stars as you can see um i looked through all of rendon's steps that they said they um made and i'm not sure at what point the the dark circles appeared and rendon said they weren't sure either my first guess is they mentioned a smart sharpen step in photoshop and sharpening could often cause these dark rings or at least accentuate them so i would just skip sharpening because i never i never do it to my nebula shots i don't think it's necessary um the other thing i'd encourage you to try is just process your ha however you want then make it starless with star net plus plus which is included with pics insight take that starless ha into photoshop set it to rgb mode um colorize that and then put the rgb image on top and use a blending mode like screen uh or lighten or whatever and then just use curves until the blend looks right um so that's just another processing idea but i i think probably your dark rings are from that smart sharpen step or because i didn't really see anything else in your processing workflow that was going to cause them okay and then rick rick sent in a photo of saturn and you know i'm not really the best to judge planetary images because all my attempts at it have been lacking much detail but this looks really good to me uh rick has clearly resolved the casini division which is this uh separation between the rings there and um my only critique here is that there seems to be a little bit of separation um between the going too far there between the red and the blue because you can see some red outline there and then some blue bluish stuff here and here there um and so that usually that happens uh because the atmosphere um so an atmospheric dispersion corrector and abc may help with that if you don't already use one i think zwo makes a pretty inexpensive one that's my only sort of planetary tip that i can i can think of otherwise i think it looks really good ricky a 17 year old astrophotographer from new zealand sent a great image of the ophiuchus region here taken with a stock canon dslr and a 50 millimeter lens and a star tracker and uh processed with pics inside a photoshop i think this looks merely perfect uh the only thing that stood out to me to improve is that there's still just a little bit of uh green noise left um the best thing to do for that is after your color calibrate but before you stretch use the scnr green noise reduction tool at about 25 30 strength um you know uh just to show the difference here in photoshop it won't be the same just something like that uh is the difference i'd expect uh if you just reduce the green noise a little bit um that's the only thing i saw other than that this looks you know perfect to me i love this framing uh that you have here with the the row fuke coming out from the uh from the bottom like a sort of like a tree uh looks really nice okay reshub uh reshub sent an image of the milky way shot untracked it's just 51 shots at 10 seconds each with a canon m50 mirrorless camera in terms of editing um i would just suggest cropping off um a little bit the sides here i don't think they are adding much uh and so just something like this i think and then i'd probably just try to fix this uh spike of light pollution in terms of acquisition i'd try doing maybe 10 times or more the number of lights if possible just to really bring down the noise in the final image uh but it looks like a great start uh just to manage the noise we just need more signal so something like 500 shots or a thousand shots is best for this kind of milky way untracked kind of image okay and then another uh reshub and another milky way image this one a single image shot from a city and they said that they they used the expose to the right rule to capture it so i actually don't suggest exposed to the right for astrophotography it will tend to just blow out highlight detail and make it unrecoverable so uh generally i don't recommend that maybe for a single exposure it's fine uh maybe that's but if you're gonna stack which is what i'd recommend you try next then don't expose to the right expose to the left uh not you know just above uh the the left edge so getting it you know getting that histogram bumped to about one quarter the way over is what you want anyways uh reshub asked if i could try to bring out as much detail in the milky way as possible so let's see here we go that's what i was able to do uh compared to reshub's shot you can see here i was able to bring out a little bit more of the dark nebula streamers but nothing i can do about these extreme gradients so it's really just trying to get this middle part is uh recovered as possible uh and i think that's it so that's sort of what you can expect to achieve from a single exposure from the city exposing to the right it's a good experiment okay and then we have rob rob sent in an image of the carina nebula taken with a canon r6 camera uh stock and the william optics 73 millimeter refractor and a sky watcher heq five mount and rob says this was their first time using pics insight they were struggling to bring out the depth of the nebula um but i think this looks really good especially with uh you know a stock camera i wonder when you're talking about bringing out the depth if you're comparing it to shots taken with a modified camera or an astro camera which is pre-modified because they're going to pick up a lot more of the dim hydrogen emission that extends out but it's trade-off because then if you're if you're using one of those then the h alpha will sort of dominate all this blue stuff in the middle and it will turn out a lot more pinker or red so anyways i don't really have anything to critique with this image it looks great to me and uh i can't wait to someday try this uh object out myself okay and then we have roger and roger uh sent in an image of the ryan nebula had some questions about his gear he's using an artist sky flattener reducer but uh wasn't sure it was flattening the field correctly because if we look at the stars here they do look pretty elongated especially in the corners so no that doesn't look right for uh field flattener the spacing should be pretty easy with a flattener it's 55 millimeters with that particular field flattener so with the dslr you should just want to get a 48 millimeter t adapter designed for cannon uh eos so your cannon 60 d you know screw that on to the flattener and then attach your dslr to the t adapter and no additional spacers and you should be right at 55 millimeters so hopefully that works to get the right back focus um if you're already doing that then i'm not sure what's going on there um other than that my only other processing note is it looks a little bit blue in the blacks especially towards the bottom of the picture here um so that's easily fixed with just like a curves adjustment just you know uh something like that i don't know just a little bit of uh bringing down the curves we might for this shot you know there's so much blue down here in this corner still we might have to do some gradient uh masking on the on the curves but that's the that's the basic idea is bring down the blue curve blue blue uh presence here a little bit in the background and next up we have roheats and roheats uh took an image of the andromeda galaxy with a red cat 51 and a zwo 183 mc from a portal three sky and i think this looks really good the overall color rendering is great and pairing the 183 with the red cat is a nice combo uh very good for pulling out lots of detail uh because you're sampled so well there my one critique is i think um at some point in processing you used a range mask or something to increase saturation in the galaxy and then but it also increased the saturation of the stars in the galaxy but not the stars outside of the galaxy and so then it looks a little bit odd because the we have stars that are in front of the galaxy not part of the galaxy and so if those are saturated and these ones aren't then it looks a bit off um so you need to when you make a mask like a range selection you also have to make a star mask and subtract the star mask from the range selection to get the best results there okay ronan captured an image of the north america nebula this is three hours of broadband and three hours with an ellen hands filter and i think the broadband component is great because the star color looks very good especially if i look at it sort of over here um but i'm not convinced this is the best palette choice for incorporating the ellen hands data i think it should be possible to get some separation of the o3 and ha uh but this looks sort of like all the want same color pink um so i think with a different stretch different combination of the channels you can get better uh color separation there and it will help um you know make the the things like the sickness wall stand out from the rest of the nebula here because right now it's sort of the details getting a bit lost in how same color everything is okay and then we have roan roan took this image of the milky way untracked with their smartphone and this was their first attempt um so i think this looks really great with the gear and technique that roan is using um they asked about calibration frames i i haven't had much luck with calibration frames on a smartphone so i probably would skip that um in any case i think it's really nice how well you captured you know uh some of the details here like the lagoon nebula um and the dark horse uh right here um i think next time if you re-center the milky way about five times uh over the night as you're taking more frames that should help eliminate uh some of this diagonal walking noise because i think that's maybe from if you just let the image drift pretty dramatically and then realigned it based on the stars you're going to get a lot of noise like that um so breaking up that noise could just be re-centering the milky way in a few different ways uh as you go and and that should help break up the the noise patterns and sage sage took this image of the m51 uh colliding galaxy pair with their william optics z61 telescope and canon t6 dslr on an ioptron sky tracker uh so this is a very uh impressive how much detail sage got on this galaxy with such a small setup uh the the only thing i noticed to critique here is just a tiny bit of tracking error sort of going up into the right hand corner it's very minimal though it's just slightly egg-shaped left to right um but i'm surprised there's actually not even more tracking error considering this is a z61 it's a pretty big hefty you know little telescope this is 360 millimeter focal length on an ioptron sky tracker so not their bigger sky guide or pro but the the sky tracker so uh really all i can say is you know keep it up sage because this is i love stuff like this of like trying to push the limits of your gear and go after you know the m51 with uh with a small package like that that's cool and sally sally took a great image of the trapezium region uh of the ryan nebula with a mead etx 60 and an sv bony 105 camera and sally said this setup is very challenging for astrophotography and hasn't been able to make calibration frames work with it yet and i mean i can imagine that would be very difficult really challenging setup to have a tiny sensor one of the smallest to cheapest cameras you can get and then pairing it with a long focal length altars motorized telescope i mean it sounds like a fun challenge but a difficult one and uh the trapezium though is the obvious choice for me for a deep sky object because it's the brightest deep sky object in the sky i believe and so a half second long exposure works well this is multiple half second long exposures stacked um but you know this you i think you've just split the the four uh trapezium stars there abc and d in the cluster and uh so i think this looks really good i don't really have any particular advice for improvements since i don't have much experience with this kind of gear but uh i do have a suggestion for another object to go after i'd like to see what you could do with the ring nebula m 57 uh i think it's bright enough so that half second exposures should work well for that too i don't know it might be harder to find than iran or i know it'd be harder to find than iran but if you can find it and uh get exposures going on it i think that would be a cool one with this setup and then we have sam sam sent in an image of the milky way captured untracked with uh smartphone uh sam shot 76 photos at 25 seconds each from a yellow zone so sam has how to improve but i feel like i should be taking lessons on smartphone astrophotography from sam because this just seems remarkably good to me uh considering the technique untracked smartphone and the sky condition being yellow um i mean i suppose it might be even better with like a barn door tracker so i have a video on making one of those but i don't know the processing here looks really great to me it doesn't look overdone uh there's a little bit of a a dark um darkening on this side uh and then a little bit of green down here but uh overall i think you know this just looks really good for for this technique so well done sam and here we have samuel um and samuel captured the milky way centered on the lagoon and trifid with a sony mirrorless camera roking down 135 and star tracker and samuel said that he shot this low on the horizon and therefore had trouble with natural color except for the reddish feel i'm not sure what that means uh i guess just that it looks reddish um i'm not uh so if you want to correct the red then um i mean a simple way we could just take a curves adjustment and go to the red and see that there's a bunch of room there and then just like do that um you know now it looks a little green so then we might have to go into greens and correct that a little bit too but then you know that's a simple way to correct the sort of overall red tone to it um i think that gets us sort of like 80 percent there if you want to go all the way i think you need to start with um a gradient you know reduction technically got a background extraction when the data is still linear so that's what i did here that gets us to an even more neutral uh photo and this you know you could process this further but i think it's pretty interesting that uh you know this is pulling out some pretty interesting little stuff this is the twiddle bug nebula right there i can sort of see it and then we have the star clouds up here at the top look pretty good so the program i can recommend to do this kind of work is seral s i r i l it's a free program or pix insight that's paid um but it'll allow you to extract the background while the data is still linear and that's going to look even better for color correction okay sandu g sent a wonderful photo here of the blue horse head nebula which is a nice challenging object very large reflection nebula near the more famous uh row ufuyuki region sort of just above it and sandu g said they had issues with star reduction leaving artifacts and gaps yes that's why i don't use star reduction for the most part i just use star removal with star net plus plus and then blend the stars back in as is but you can sort of control this intensity of them since they're on their own layer and you can control the stretch um i guess these stars seem to me to be like overstretched and then reduced uh they're like very bloated here and then they seem reduced after that so i don't think that's a good idea generally um then i also think you went a little bit too dark with the background here like if i look at your starless image you have a lot of dust out here and i i get that it's sort of broken up because of noise uh so maybe you went dark because you wanted to hide some of that um broken upness of the of that um but i don't know it's a balancing act i get it um so i'm not gonna criticize that too much because i i didn't go through the steps of processing this and so maybe you found you just couldn't bring out all that dust um uh so it's uh something to consider but the other thing i'd say about the stars is if you don't reduce them i think they can help hide actually some of that noise um rather than you know when you when you reduce the stars and then you have the all the dusty stuff it's it's really difficult because it's it's usually that very faint dust is noisy and so uh it's uh you're gonna have to do something with it and the gaps and artifacts you're talking about are just sort of the result of of processing the photo too much sometimes um so i think you this is a very dramatic look um but if you wanted to go for something a little bit less dramatic i think just putting all of the stars onto something like this and then just increasing the saturation might look good too all right sand more sand more shot the lagoon and triphid nebula with an olympus camera and nicore lens and a sky watcher star adventurer oh and a sv bony u hc filter ultra high contrast and sand more process this with deep sky stacker seral and snap seed so i think the lagoon nebula here looks great um not blown out but night in nice detail on that cluster um some of the stars or most of the stars i guess seem too saturated to me you know when they're this bright red uh sort of a solid saturated red that almost looks like a hot pixel uh i think that means your stars are are too saturated so just to show you how i'd process your image this is just um a crop background extraction and stretch and seral followed by just a small reduction in green here and that's it um and you can see the the star color is a little bit more natural so stars that have gone sort of red in your image are more of a orange in my image i mean they're sort of red stars but they they don't look that red so this is sort of a more natural maybe more boring look than what you have here but uh just to give you an idea of another way to go and then next we have sasha and sasha captured this wonderful dark nebula region with a 170 with a 107 millimeter refractor and a zwo 2600 mc camera so a color zwo camera and they processed it in pix insight and uh so they're most concerned with color and saturation and uh you know i think both the color and saturation are really well done uh the colorful star field always looks so good with this um brown dust stuff and then i think your your black is perfect i love i love this black um so i think that looks really good but my one critique is um you wrote out all your steps and personally i would have skipped the morphological transformation step at the end uh just because to me uh you know i think what happened when you did that is it made the smallest stars smaller and uh that that when you do that i think the smallest stars just end up looking sort of like noise because they're so small um with pix insight if uh to play with a star deemphasis just with pix insight i would check out adam blocks method um and there's now a script for it too which can make it even easier um but i found that the adam block method um instead of going after the smallest stars it's going to go after this size star like a medium size star and make that a little bit smaller um it leaves the big stars alone and it leaves the smallest stars alone it goes after those sort of medium ones which i think is is the best uh idea for a star deemphasis okay and then sasa undo sasa undo shot the milky way with a canon dsl r and kit lens untracked from a yellow zone processed with deep sky stacker and gimp and it looks like sasa undo pushed the saturation pretty far um and maybe before removing light pollution gradients which what which was giving us this sort of color shift from red to yellow uh to green even um and so i'd suggest sasa undo look into using seral s i r i l it's free and open source it has a background extraction tool and uh so that's what i was able to get out of it um it gives a much flatter image like this and uh and then you can continue to process and you know add saturation and do all that kind of stuff to it um but if you're if you have a pretty flat image like this to start out with then when you add saturation to your image you don't get these sort of extreme artificial uh color shifts because basically you're just uh coloring a light pollution gradient when you if you haven't flattened the the overall image first and sergey sergey shot the north america and pelican with a modded nikon dsl r a telephoto lens and an ops along ellen hands on a star tracker and sergey said that their main problem was with flats and thought that they didn't take them correctly and my first thought was that this picture looked a little bit soft um so i wondered if it was out of focus but when i processed the raw data that sergey sent it was much sharper so i'm not sure why it came out sort of soft like that but then also in the raw data um there are these little black artifacts sort of all over um um and so i don't know uh sergey didn't really mention those i don't think um so my guess is that the sensor or the lens are dirty i'm betting more on the sensor um it looks like a physical issue of some kind um but i guess if the flats were really wrong it could be that too um but without knowing more details i can't say but for flats uh an easy thing to try is just uh very short exposures on bright you know blue sky uh those are called sky flats uh try those if you if you haven't because i think you have really nice data here except for all these little black spots so i'm not really sure what those are about and then next we have shake van shake van captured the Cygnus loop supernova remnant with a canon 80d and a 200 millimeter lens on a star tracker with an sv bony cls filter from a yellow zone and i think this looks pretty good um as we've seen from past pictures in this critique the veil nebula is difficult with this dense star field and this is a pretty dramatic way to handle it it's like all most of the stars the small stars are gone because they're so dimmed um but i think um i actually think it looks pretty well done for the technique you used my one critique of this picture is that the sky background looks sort of blue green so i just maybe move the black point slightly on that um something like that i don't know might be slightly better um then but then you are losing maybe some of this uh o3 nebula city um by doing it that way so i don't know it's a trade-off okay and then we have shushank pincha shushank pincha um captured the eagle nebula with a zwo 533 mc and an opt along ellen hance and a william optics zenith star 81 on an eye up drawn mount from a portal seven in the sky and this was their first shot with the new equipment uh so they didn't have much time to set it up and they didn't have as much time for gathering the images only 49 minutes but shushank asked if there is anything to do in processing that can make up for having so little data not really uh the only thing i'd suggest is um your background sky is very bright here with like lots of weird noise i'm not sure the i think you did something weird with noise reduction um to get out like that so i would do much less noise reduction try not to brighten the sky so much try to keep it more dark um maybe some of this is actual ha emission um i don't know it looks weird to me um so i don't remember ever seeing a ton of ha emission like this above the eagle i think i thought most of it was low so but i could be wrong that could be actual ha but it looks weird um uh and then shushank also asked about deep sky stacker versus weighted batch preprocessor w bpp in pix insight versus doing a full manual calibration registration and stacking in pix insight and personally i've had good luck with any method um but what i do if it's just one night a one night project then i'll typically use the weighted batch preprocessor in pix insight if it's an ongoing multi-night project then i do everything manually because i find that easier and more flexible to manage the way that i do it and then you wrote a number of other things um i'll i'll note them down and try to address them in future videos okay and then shipwreck 88 shipwreck 88 captured the lagoon nebula with an ellen hands filter but actually didn't mean to use the ellen hands filter as they usually have installed for city imaging but this was taken from a darker portal five four site and then one thing shipwreck 88 asked is if the ellen hands was detriment to the image meaning yes and no in this case i'd say mostly yes since this is um in the milky way and so getting that natural star color looks really cool in this for this field because it really fills the field with lots of nice stars um and the ellen hands being a dual narrowband filter is pretty crappy for the stars they all sort of look white or red when like that this cluster here should be a brilliant blue for instance um and then also uh speaking of blue right here this should be a brilliant blue reflection nebula but because of the ellen hands it gets it gets pretty dimmed out because you just have that smaller 20 nanometer band pass for picking up the blue and most of that sort of actually tilted to the green so no filter probably would have been better but also a mix of this and the no filter would have been good too here's my uh crazy rendition just to really pull out uh as much detail as there is in here i know that it's like a very noisy uh outside of the nebulae um but i just wanted to show you that how much was in your data in terms of this bridge between the lagoon and this thing and uh even there's even more blue sort of reflection uh in there um so just to give you an idea of if you really wanted to push your data further um you could uh the best would be to do something like this like what i'm doing here and then make this starless and then put the good stars on on top of this uh with no filter okay this is simon simon captured the central part of the ryan constellation with a nikon z 50 and a zoom lens on a sky watcher star adventurer and simon mentioned that the right star here on the ryan's belt looking a bit funky but found it looked that way in all of their light frames and uh asked if that's about the lens and yes i can confirm that that's distortion that's common with camera lenses so uh nothing you can do about it i do like the saturation of the blue stars that looks cool um i think the saturation on the reds and magenta's across the frame is a little bit too much so just to give you an idea of where i'd put it i'd put it closer to there so here's before notice these very reddish orange uh saturated things and then there's after and even though this is just the jpeg i feel like i'm recovering detail in the flame there uh so uh that's the personal thing but that's where i'd put the saturation on those colors the blue saturation i think looks fine uh very highly highly saturated like you have it okay and then we have simon pepper 85 who captured the veil nebula or the sygnus loop whatever you want to call it with a red cat a zwo 294 mc and an optalong l extreme filter i think this looks pretty good um it's a very dramatic look lots of contrast the you know maybe this you're starting to blow details here in some parts uh with how bright this is um but it stands out very boldly and simon pepper 85 mentioned they're never satisfied with prints compared to seeing their photos on a monitor or on instagram and i think there are a number of reasons prints can end up not looking how we want compared to what we see on the screen i plan to do a series on printing options in the future including lots of tips for printing at home where we have a little bit more control over the process and can experiment a bit more to get the best results possible and so hopefully i can get to that this year and give people some good tips for printing astrophotography because it's pretty different than printing anything else i think okay and then we have stefan who sent in the eagle nebula taken with a full spectrum canon dslr and a combination of ha filtered exposures and ones with an astronomic um l2 filter which is a luminance filter so that's good for getting the natural star color which stefan has here um i did process this picture from scratch i didn't think that my rendition really looked any different than yours i think the only chase choice i made differently was cropping in just a tiny bit more than you did but other than that i think uh with the great sort of you know detail you got here and the pillars and the ha data i just wanted to crop in a little bit more okay and then we have stefan who is a 16 year old astrophotographer who captured the veil nebula with a sky watcher 200 pds reflector and a zwo 294 mc and an opt-along l-enhanced filter and stefan asked why the background looks so dead especially the lower right here and says their guess is that it needs more contrast i think the issue there is you're bringing out the details uh too much uh basically that this should be a fainter signal than the main part of the veil nebula here but because you're pushing it to be as bright as this then it looks dead in comparison um if that makes sense so because if we imagine the veil nebula is this big sphere that's what it is sort of is a supernova remnant um i think this part is probably the back of the sphere and then this part is like the front of the sphere and so this part should be a lot dimmer than this part um so uh here's sort of my interpretation given that of how i would change your processing so here's yours there's mine you can see i made this part back here this part here this part here kept those all much dimmer while making the the veil the main veil nebula here a lot brighter uh because it feels like it should be and it is i think closer to us um so uh just keeping it very simple uh don't oversaturate don't over brighten the background stuff focus your attention on the main event which will help it stand out and look like it is more uh in front and in charge um all right and it's you know it's a really nice data it was fun to process so thanks for sending it Steph okay Stefan captured the Andromeda galaxy with a Canon EOS R6 and a Canon fd 80 to 200 millimeter lens which is an old lens um he said no matter what he tried with flats he couldn't get rid of this very strong ring pattern um and so you know that's really those ring patterns are hard to get rid of sometimes you have to track down what could be reflecting i don't know if it's something with the lens um uh but i've i've encountered those ring patterns mostly with spacers that were sort of an anodized metal and shiny um even though they were black they were would reflect um of course in this image just cropped down to get rid of them but uh if you didn't want to crop them out uh they're hard to like i said they're hard to get rid of the way i'd sort of approach it is making these circular gradients and so then brightening the middle part i didn't quite get it right and then brightening the outer ring and then you darken the whole thing and you can see it's still there a little bit because i didn't quite do it right but um that's the basic idea of how i'd approach trying to get rid of those those rings uh very difficult unfortunately okay and then we have subtle astro subtle astro shot this at f5 on a static tripod with a sigma zoom lens and a stock canon dslr without any filters from a portal eight sky so that's a very challenging uh setup so good for you for giving it a go my suggestion with processing is to be careful with the star treatment um as it feels like lots of your stars have disappeared or sort of turned into a pattern of noise kind of thing um uh i did process your image from your stacked tiff file and um got a pretty different result because i kept in all the stars um but i i still think a very impressive result that we can really see the clear outline of the north america and pelican even some details within them untracked from a portal eight i didn't even know that was possible with a stock camera from portal eight so i always i always like to know that uh things i didn't know were possible are actually possible and then we have sons of cosmos who captured the north america nebula with a celestial rossa zwo 294 mm and border high speed narrowband filters and i like i like these colors for the nebula the green looks awesome here uh it's cool it's like a sort of bluish green i think um and uh has a nice subtle transition into the other colors into the yellows and the and the oranges um i have two small critiques one is that the stars don't need to be this saturated and the saturation i think is what's causing them to have these sort of dark ring like features on them which is most distracting like over here and in here uh where the the dark rings really stand out it doesn't really matter in the dark nebula and speaking of the dark nebula they they look this one especially looks way too blue i'm not sure why that happened but um be easy to fix just uh you know go into your blue channel and and uh break and fix that like that well maybe it's not as easy to fix as i thought because i'm now really changing the color balance so let's see if i do something like that no well anyways i that's uh i guess it's not working on the jpeg here but that that dark nebula there uh shouldn't be blue it should be black basically uh tottage uh captured the Cygnus region around the bright star dineb right here and i'm not sure if i've ever seen it uh like this this is feels flipped to me i'm just gonna flip it just uh just to show you what i mean so i'm used to it looking like that with uh uh the north america and the right way around um anyways um the only other uh suggestion i have in terms of i don't know you can flip it or not flip it i don't really care but uh just for me it feels more natural this way but uh the only other suggestion i have is uh here this um bright corner right here just feels a little bit uh unnatural i think that's a light pollution gradient um and it feels like um maybe combination of like a slight crop uh with yeah something in photoshop here let me show you what i mean so if i just do maybe a slight crop and then do a i know this is this is weird what i'm doing here this doesn't seem to make sense but then what i'm going to do is on this mask i'm just going to apply a little gradient like that and then the result is this taking out the that brightness of that corner you just get a nice flatter feel that way um but i think this looks really nice i should have mentioned this was shot with a nikon dslr nikon zoom lens and on a star adventurer by sky watcher and it's from a portal for sky and so yeah there's just that same process i guess i already did it once okay and here is talal talal is a 16 year old astrophotographer from kawait and talal shot the elephant trunk nebula untracked from portal nine sky wow with a stock camera and lens and this they took over 3000 shots wow i think this um that's dedication and this looks really good considering that gear and uh technique and sky condition um you can see a lot of the dark nebula and the sky and the stars look really good too now we're not seeing really any of the emission nebula but it's very dim uh to shoot untracked it's not the first one i would have thought of to try untracked it's it's a very dim nebula so i'm amazed at how much you were able to bring out and clean up uh here uh just uh what you did um so keep it up i think you're going to love that tracker you mentioned when you get it maybe you already have it at this point and i'm interested to see more from you okay and then we have uh tapfret and tapfret sent in a nice image of the enthrometer galaxy taken with a canon dslr a telephoto lens and an ioptron skyguider pro and tapfret said their issues they had in processing was the glows left behind by star net plus plus when it removes stars and dealing those without dealing with those without complex masks and tapfret specifically mentioned having issues with messier 32 which is this little thing right here it's a little satellite galaxy and so let me show you my approach here so let's start with the starless you can see here's the starless m32 we have that nasty artifact but when i add the stars back m32 comes back and i don't think it really looks that bad because it covers up that artifact um and then i just add some selective color and curves adjustments uh until it's uh done so it's there's more stars uh the stars are brighter than in tapfret's uh interpretation um in mine's a little there's you know it's a little bit more stars and like i said but i i don't find that star net artifacts don't really bother me because they get covered up uh as soon as i add back the stars um but with the benefit of the galaxy does pop out uh by doing it this way because like if i just use the star's layer let me turn this off turn this to normal you can see that doesn't look nearly as finished is if i turn this back on and turn the star's layer to screen okay next we have tensor and tensor captured the lagoon and trifid area with an aperture 60 ed at f6 with a zwo 294 mc and on a sky watcher star adventurer wow so just over an hour of data from a portal for sky and they said they were disappointed in various aspects various aspects of it but you know i really think that's just a matter of expectations being too high perhaps because i think this looks excellent for the equipment and sky conditions and amount of data i don't really see anything in the processing that could be improved in my opinion it's excellent you have really cool details throughout the field tensor mentioned they hadn't found many processes in pics insight that had worked well to improve their data with some processes making it worse for processes they mentioned making it worse they mentioned deconvolution and multi-scale multi-scale linear transform mlt so in my experience the only way deconvolution works well on under sampled data like this is if you get a ton of very well dithered data drizzle it at two times and then do decon on that drizzled data but this unfortunately won't work for you since you can't dither effectively enough with a star adventurer since it doesn't move in declination and so then i don't think drizzle is a good idea so i wouldn't do decon or you can but it's just not going to do anything mlt can be used for blurring or sharpening at different scales so i'm not sure which you tried it for with enough data i think it can be used to blur out some fine noise scales um the very like sort of small variations in noise um but with only an hour of data i wouldn't recommend it for that um i find that kind of blurring noise reduction with something like mlt or mmt that works best when you have like 15 to 20 hours of data to work with um so anyways all that's just to say i agree with you many of the processes in pixight pix insight only work well when we can really push the data um and to push the data it needs to have pretty high snr signal to noise ratio which you'll only get from gathering more data on the target an hour is uh going to be tough for a lot of processes now one you did use is the background extraction tools and i think uh that's a really cool feature in pix insight and you use them while here because this looks like a very nice flat field okay and then next up we have this astronomy enthusiast who sent in an image of the eagle nebula taken with a modded nikon dslr a 500 millimeter telephoto lens and a sky watcher star adventurer wow another cool one on the star adventurer this was from portal two and taken over three nights so about 12 hours total integration and the astronomy enthusiast mentioned the one thing they felt they could work on is star control well i'm glad they didn't try to overly reduce the stars uh they look good they look natural the thing i notice um is the stars are sort of one note in terms of color they're pretty yellow or white and i think that's a function of sort of blue in general being missing from this photo um so just to step you through how i would process this data let me switch over to pix insight so all i did was i opened your master light and i ran automatic background extractor on it to get this which i think has really nice star color and also nice um you know variation uh here in the you know in the main eagle nebula region um and then i just ran uh star net plus plus on it to get this then i brought that both these images back into photoshop here we go and i put the starless on the bottom put that masked uh stretch on top this is the stars set it to screen blend mode at 100 percent and then it was just a little too bright so then i just brought down the black point and that's it so that's an it's an idea of a very very simple workflow i mean you could you could keep processing from here of course um do different things add saturation whatever but um i think it shows you sort of a more natural look to your data natural color with all the star variety and everything um here i think you just yeah you went a little too far into the like the one sort of color scheme it's just sort of red pink and yellow only um and then here you just this is a lot more color variety um it was sort of like browns and pinks and reds and blues and yellows let's see what happens if we add some saturation to this too much let's do there i think it's pretty interesting um maybe it has a little bit of green parts if they'll deal with but pretty nice data 12 hours from portal 2 that's that's i wish i could uh have that more often okay next up we have the mad lawyer and the mad lawyer sent in an image of the shark nebula in cpheus taken with a canon r a and a william optics gt 81 telescope this is about five hours total of data at f 5.5 from a portal for sky and the mad lawyer said that they had a hard time processing dark nebula successfully finding it hard to pull them out without accentuating artifacts um and the like the last one i again tried to keep this very simple so i'll just step through my process here i just stretched your uh tiff file and ran star net plus plus on it that gave me this and yet you can see there's artifacts left over but i don't i'm not going to deal with those i'm just going to add contrast here to the starless image and then put the star uh filled image right on top of it set to a screen blend mode with the opacity set to 92 percent and anywhere there was an artifact like right there the star covers it right up so i'm not going to care about those artifacts and then i can reset the black point so we're really starting to get somewhere now um looks pretty good i think and then the last thing i'm going to do is i just made a new copy of this from visible so that's control alt shift e and then i turned that black and white by just going to image adjustments black and white and this is just to make a mask so i copied this i'm just going to do control a control c to copy that then do alt click and control v to throw it into this mask on the hue saturation adjustment layer turn this layer off so that this hue saturation layer is adjusting on everything below and this is the difference it makes so just adding some saturation and you know we could go even further with it if we wanted to and then this is how we can sort of see the brown dust and but also all the nice star color across the field by adding saturation to it so that's it um i didn't do any noise reduction i didn't try to clean up any artifacts i just went starless contrast stars with a screen blend mode reset black point added saturation right next up we have the stellar remnant who says this is their first photo with this setup and their second attempt ever at astrophotography they captured the north america and pelican nebulae here with canon e s r a opt along the extreme and a radian raptor 61 on a sky watcher star adventurer they said the outside temperature was 93 degrees fahrenheit but they didn't do any noise reduction just to see how well the camera the r a handles high temperatures well i think it looks perfectly well captured it's very impressive that this is only our second attempt at astrophotography the processing is good i um it's just a little one note uh red for my taste so let me just show you uh sort of what i would do with it um i would start with your you know red processing then go into the channels here and extract out this green channel just by copying it pasting it on here okay i'm gonna then change that green um layer from normal to screen gets us this and then i'm going to clip a hue slash saturation adjustment layer to that green channel extracted set to a hue in the blues here that's going to get us this and then it's too bright overall now so i'm just gonna reset our black point like that and i'm now noticing there's a bit too much green over there so let's do another curves layer go to the green channel bring down the green and then do a slight gradient here like that there actually there's too much green and almost the entire picture let's see and maybe we don't need a gradient mask at all let's just fill that with white yeah actually i like that take out all the green okay so that just to show you the before and after so here's before very red here's after bringing more blue back into the ebulae and now we have tim the astro nerd who sent in a nice rich field of the pleaties taken with a stock nikon d5300 a william optics red cat and the a ryan atlas mount and tim said they were pretty new to photoshop and process this with an arc sine curve preset and i like how you know how much the you got the dust to stand out i think overall the image is a little too bright and a little too blue so just to show you sort of where i would go i'd bring down the black level a bit like that and i would bring down on some of those blues now the image is too green so let's do something like this okay so i would go somewhere like that with the processing just to give you an idea some of these dust clouds which look very blue in your image because there's sort of like a blue wash to your whole thing should be more brown and uh yeah and the the sky background should be more of like a dark blackish brown it's looking you know because i'm just working on the jpeg now it's looking almost too red but you get the idea but other than that i think this looks really good looks very nice and sharp and in focus okay now we have tobias and tobias sent in this very well done star trails photo and it's a nice change of pace for this critique it was shot with a sony mirrorless camera and a sigma wide angle lens and it was over a thousand photos at 30 seconds each combined in photoshop nothing to really critique here looks pretty flawless to me i especially like how the color balance of the trails which is overall pretty blue plays against this more golden brown of the power here i do wonder about your technique as you said that it was 30 second exposures and combined in photoshop i've tried that kind of thing and um if you know between the 30 second exposures there's usually like a one second gap while it's taking the next before it takes the next picture and i found with that one second gap it would like leave little gaps that were visible in the star trails so i found a program called star stacks that fixes that by filling the gaps but i wonder if you have a different uh method in photoshop for doing that okay and then this next one this is by another tobias who captured the bodes and cigar galaxies from a portal six sky with a william optics 102 millimeter refractor a zwo 2600 mc and an ioptron sem 40 ec mount 12 hours integration time so this is really well done it shows if you put in the time even if you have some light pollution it's possible to get some really nice color and details on galaxies and get a very clean result i think um tobias said the only thing they felt there was missing from their photo was attention to the background since they'd seen lots of pictures where i assume what they saw was people bringing out like these little satellite galaxies and ifn and all kinds of stuff in the background i'm not sure i mean even though you know i just said you got this really nice clean result on the galaxies these are really bright these messy a galaxies and so i'm not sure from a portal six how much you're going to be able to bring out ifn or if it's you know worth worth doing worth trying um so anyways i think you made the right call here with how you processed it uh and and darkening the background to make these galaxies really stand out tom uh tom you captured the wizard nebula with a canon t7 uh sky watcher star travel 80 t telescope and a scar sky watcher star adventure tom shot 100 lights at 30 seconds each at f 4.9 and this is a definitely a hard object to go after with a stock dslr so hats off to you tom and tom said they struggled with details in the nebula outside the central part and also star color shift between the nebula and the rest of the photo so i guess they mean these sort of pinkish magenta stars here in the nebula i wonder if you were trying to do some selective adjustments and caught those stars when you were trying to change the color of the nebula maybe um i'll show my process for your data that you sent the stacked tiff for it's a pretty different look um what i did is i took your uh photo i did a background extraction in the free program serial s i r i l then i ran that through star net plus plus you know it left a fair amount of artifacts but it also isolated the nebula i then applied this color correction curve to that bring out the nebula a little bit more then put the stars on top of that and set them to screen blend mode and then just reset the black point and i kept the image a lot wider um than you did i know maybe that wasn't your intention maybe you always wanted to crop in a lot more on the wizard but i'm i like wide field stuff so that's why i did it this way um but anyways thanks for sending that in tom and here we go this is uh it's bright uh toshal sent in an image of the moon and clouds taken with a smartphone and an explorer scientific newtonian reflector and it's a single frame image but toshal asked about how to get sharper images so i think the key to sharper images of the moon and the planets is instead of taking a single exposure like you did here take uh video and then use pip uh an auto stacker to free programs on windows to pull out the best frames from that video that you can do it automatically you sort of tell them how to how how many you want to pull out and then you stack only those best frames and the way that that technique works it's called lucky imaging it works because the software can find frames where there are moments of great seeing moments where the air isn't as turbulent and stack only those and you get this sharper image then you usually ever can with a single exposure so that's my advice for a sharper moon image okay and then we have tyler and tyler captured the entramida galaxy with a canon x s i dslr a 55 to 250 zoom lens and a sky watcher star adventurer and this looks great especially considering that that's a very old dslr the first dslr i used to rest in photography was the canon t2i and this x si was an older rebel model i think three or four models before the t2i so it must have been pre 2010 that it was released anyways the processing looks very good nice work bringing out the colors the colors look perfect they know the exactly how they should uh with the the dark um nebula and uh and the blue star clusters and the the core everything looks great here um my one critique is i think you might have a little bit of polar alignment error because the stars all have a little bit of trailing up and down so you did 90 second subs i would try maybe 60 seconds see if the stars are are sharper and rounder with shorter sub exposures okay this is by ukles i don't know if i'm saying that right ukles sent in a photo of the lagoon and trifid nebulae taken with a canon sl3 70 to 300 millimeter zoom lens and a sky watcher star adventurer and they mentioned they limited the 30 second exposures because the ambient temperature was high when they took this so they wanted to be careful about not adding too much thermal noise that's a smart strategy my critique of this image is mostly to do with the color so i'll show you where i'd head with it um so here's just your original jpeg um i'd start by removing a lot of green because green is not a particularly natural color to deep sky there's no green stars so i would just first remove a lot of those green uh stars like this and then overall i'd remove i'd lower the saturation which i think will actually help recover it detail even in this jpeg i feel like by lowering the saturation i'm seeing more detail in the core of the nebulae here and but also i think it helps the star color the star field look a little better okay v like the letter v sent in an image of the sygnus region taken with a zwo 1600 mm uh zwo 7 nanometer ha filter and a canon nifty 50 lens on an ioptron skyguider pro all controlled by a raspberry pi mini computer and this is just five lights at five minutes each so i love this it i love sygnus and but it also this picture shows the flexibility of astrophotography today that you can pair an inexpensive lens on a relatively inexpensive star tracker uh it's like a skyguider pros like five hundred dollars maybe but with a dedicated mono camera and ha filter and get results like this in 25 minutes uh that's amazing uh how good this is and perfectly framed you know the the veil is a little tight but you did get it in there he also got the tulip up here that's so cool um v plans to shoot o3 and s2 and i think it's gonna look really great if you make this full color in narrowband you know 25 minutes is relatively little integration time but it already i think looks pretty nice um don't really have anything to critique about this and i think it's a really neat idea for a kit all right valentine captured the triangular galaxy messier 33 had 85 millimeters of the sony mirrorless camera and a sky watcher easy gti in equatorial mode from a portal seven location and valentine said they did not have the disk space to stack all their shots at once so they would stack groups of 200 exposures and then delete i think the individual 200 exposures then stack another 200 and keep doing it that way and then stack all the resulting uh masters together and they asked if this was okay and yes i think it works pretty well i mean i still need to do a more rigorous test to see if i can actually see any difference between doing it that way versus stacking everything at once but theoretically i don't think there could be there would be a huge difference between the two anyways i think the processing looks really nice here um my only critique is with color i just think that m 33 shouldn't be quite this blue um so i processed it from scratch just to show you sort of the color i'm thinking m 33 should be closer to which is more of a neutral with pockets lots of pockets of pink um because it has a lot of hydrogen emission so just to show you the difference here before and after and i zoomed in a little bit or a cropped in a little bit i guess uh but i actually sort of like your crop better so maybe i should have left it like that because i like the seeing the sea of stars and then the little galaxy in the middle okay valter valter took a photo of the lagoon and triphid nebulae with a canon 600d sky watcher 72 millimeter refractor and a sky watcher eq three mount and i think this looks really good the data looks very nice um my only critique of it is that the processing feels too dark um the lagoon here is within the milky way so there should be more faint stars sort of popping out um so let me show you what that would look like this is the same data just brighter basically um and but i think that by making it brighter you can also see more details and things like the blue reflection nebula around the triphid and some of this extended nebulosity in the lagoon and then van city asked a photography captured the pillars of creation at the center of the eagle nebula with a celestial eight inch s ct and a 0.63 reducer on an alt as mount i'll take in with canon 60d and i think this looks really nice uh van city astra asked about why the stars looked funky around the edges my guess is it has nothing to do with your optics and all to do with your mount with an alt as mount you're going to get field rotation it's uh unavoidable and this looks just like field rotation so uh the only answer there is moving to an equatorial mount uh unfortunately but i wouldn't worry about it i don't think it detracts from the shot very much um you could also always just crop in because i don't think the you know you have so much detail here in the in the nebula that just cropping out those sort of funky stars would actually maybe be good let me just go here something like that and the only thing with uh processing i'd recommend is just maybe just a tad brighter so i just did a slightly brighter version here where i brightened up the the nebula but this is really cool it's one of the better natural color pillars of creation shots i've seen okay and then next we have vlad and vlad captured the milky way untracked with a stock canon dslr canon nifty 50 lens and stacked 41 four second shots with sequitur and then processed them in photo shot and my thought on this one uh is it looks a tad on the green side and could use a little bit more contrast so just to show you that that direction i just put a curves layer here on your photo and uh did a little more contrast and took out a little green and there's the result so before after other thing i could recommend is if you want to add another free program other than sequitur to your workflow uh ciril s i r i l has a background extraction tool that should make getting good color and get rid of some of these gradients um very easy to do okay yannis captured the row of yuki cloud complex with a sony point and shoot camera an rx 10 version two on a move shoot move star tracker so that's a really neat lightweight kit there it probably all fits in a small carry-on bag the moveshoot move is one of the smallest trackers i know of and i think the sony rx 10 is a very compact camera as well my suggestion for improving this shot is either shoot flat frames uh because there's a lot of vignetting or um you know uh if you don't want to do flats or they don't work for you you could just crop in uh so i cropped in a little bit here just to show and doesn't look too great but um get the idea you can bring out a little bit more color in the nebulosity have to work on the noise a little bit i think in the background but that's the idea yeah because i think this might be uncorrectable vignetting it looks too dark to probably correct because now i'm i'm actually liking your crop better so maybe just leave it as is i don't know okay and now we have yantung yantung bemo yantung bemo captured m 101 uh also known as the pinwheel galaxy with a canon dslr and a celestron next star 102 slt telescope in its default with its default alt as mount and yantung bemo processed with zero gimp and light room mobile and they said that they found the noise hard to deal with in processing especially in the background and would end up just dealing it with crushing the blacks and you know that's exactly what i would do too uh and what i did i think galaxy shots look good with nice black backgrounds um well with nebula shots and i was telling people you know don't crush your blacks but here i think let's see where you put them yeah i think uh putting them around 15 15 15 something like that is good with a nebula shot i'd recommend 30 30 30 but i think crushing the blacks a little bit more to deal with noise is fine um i processed this one too let's see looks a little noisy but um what i was trying to do i guess was um get a little bit more color variety into the galaxy because i know that this galaxy does have these ha regions which give the inner part uh some of this sort of like pinkish look um so i thought that was interesting to try to try to bring that out um as for your question about being at the limit of your gear um i don't know you might be close because i think this looks very good for that telescope and dslr i think the best thing to save for if you're looking for a gear upgrade would be a star tracker or an equatorial mount um because an alt as mount is probably going to be limiting uh in some ways um so probably one of those would be something to save for and now we have zan zan sent an image of sygnus taken with a canon dslr a canon nifty 50 stopped down to f 3.2 with a barn door tracker and zan took 20 light frames at three minutes each for one hour total and they were wondering about how to get better especially when it comes to noise but zan already put in the caveat how to get better about hiding noise without taking more data so they knew i was going to say yeah just triple your exposure time um well so maybe i'll just mention it again getting more total time under the night sky is always going to be the best because that's going to increase your signal to noise ratio and then you can push the data further in processing the only good way to hide noise without getting more data is just being more conservative in how you're pushing the processing so zan did a really pretty cool job of really pushing the processing here the stars have almost disappeared uh how much you know this is pushed um it's almost like a starless edit um but stars themselves can sort of hide noise so i don't think that actually looks any better when it comes to noise but then compared to zan's edit but i guess my idea here was that if you know if you do a more conservative thing maybe it hides some noise i think this just is a different kind of edit uh not really necessarily a less noisy one so well it depends what you mean by noise i guess i don't know visual noise or or actual noise but anyways different edit uh keeping all the stars in gets you that it's a balancing act you know between bringing out these dark structures in wide field bringing out the stars if that's you're interested in that bringing out the emission nebulae um but i really actually do like this edit even though normally i don't like the ones where they've taken out all the stars this one looks really tasteful to me for some reason okay and then we have zane kite photography this is uh the last photo in the critique and it's of the central orion region taken with the nicon dslr on an eye optron skyguider pro it's just 14 exposures at two minutes each and zane kite said that they couldn't get rid of this airplane flying through in the lower right part of the frame down here um that actually i'm surprised by with something that bright with 14 exposures stacked i wonder if in deep sky stacker you were using the average stacking method rather than the default kappa sigma clipping because i i would think that with kappa sigma clipping that those pixels would have been um bright enough that wouldn't they would be rejected and same thing with this um meteor strike right here i would have thought that would have been rejected from the stack if you're using kappa sigma so my my guess is you were using average or something like that um i don't know of any good way to manually get rid of uh plane trails or satellite trails um i always just rely on the rejection algorithm when you stack um but other than that aspect um i think this photo looks really nice um really well processed bringing out all this brown dust in just a 28 minute total exposure and the saturation level looks pretty nice um just right on the edge you know like it's uh bringing the saturation right up to that limit uh but not uh over that limit where we'd start losing details to the saturation for anyone that's has stuck around to the very end congratulations and i've decided i want to do a bonus clip here at the end where i critique one of my own astrophotos this is something i just remembered that i did on the last critique video and i thought it'd be nice to keep up the the tradition um this time i'm going to critique the astrophoto i've by far spent the most time on to date um which is an ongoing mosaic project in the constellation Cygnus and it's but it's centered so far on a part of Cygnus that i don't think it's as much uh attention and it's definitely a project that has helped me learn a lot of troubleshooting and processing techniques and even new software because at some point i added astrophixel processor which was really actually invaluable for doing some of the mosaic construction so to start out let me explain for anyone who doesn't know about this project that originally i planned to stop with this which is hopefully you can see is the central part of this right and so this is just eight panels and 46 hours total integration across ha o3 and rgb filters and i finished this in 2018 and it was very very happy with it i thought wow that's my best astrophoto to date i really like it um and so i was thinking originally when i was just making this that i that's that would be it but then as soon as i was done i was like i felt this feeling of like i'm it's done i want to keep going and then people you know encourage me to keep going too so i thought well okay maybe i'll expand it um so i thought of different ways to expand it like i could expand it to the right to the left uh down up whatever um decided to expand it in one panel in every direction so if you have eight panels and you go out one panel in every direction that would make it 24 panels total um so big undertaking but i managed to actually gather all that data um to make a 24 panel mosaic in 2020 um because i took 2019 off but then when i tried to stack all of this uh all 24 panels i was still working on only laptops i had a mac laptop and a windows laptop and that's it and i tried it both on the mac laptop the windows laptop no luck both pics inside an astrophixel processor both told me there's not enough memory 16 gigabytes or 32 gigabytes or whatever it is was not enough and it just crapped out it would sometimes try to run all night and crap out other times like astrophixel processor would just tell me when i click the button no way i'm not gonna stack it for you um so uh by i ended up um gathering more data in 2021 while i was saving for a new computer which i have now it's just like giant pc uh with 128 gigabytes of ram and a really good uh processor uh horizon nine processor um so but by the time that i bought that computer i'd gather 214 hours of data so that's what you're seeing here um and over 24 panels i got it all stacked and processed like this and guess what after three years of waiting i was disappointed with the result um maybe that was inevitable i don't know i just didn't feel that artistically it was that much of an improvement over the original eight panel uh release despite probably being i don't know 15 times 20 times the effort and time put into it i mean in terms of just integration going from 46 to 214 that's like something like five times more total but when you think of all the setup time and and all the processing and all the time spent saving for the computer and all these different things i think it was probably a lot a lot more uh than that um so there there i'm not gonna say it was i felt that they're equal in all ways like there are definitely some things um that i'll point out here that i think improved in this new rendition um so in in 2021 one thing that happened because i was waiting to buy the computer was i had more time on these 24 panels so i spent some of that time um gathering more 03 on the Cygnus shell area here w 63 which definitely helped with um making sure it wasn't noisy or too noisy at least um compared to the original and it also sort of beefed it up a little bit like i think it looks a little bit more filled in in this one the other thing that i did that i really actually thought was pretty cool was i gathered s2 data um and figured out a way to incorporate that into this and it's pretty subtle but there's a couple areas where it just helped a whole lot and one of them is right here in the propeller region um you see that there's like sort of like pinks and it's just very subtle what it did well in this one this is the area um right here let's see right down here that i thought stuck out like a sore thumb i hated that so much how this looked the 03 edition right here but i just i couldn't figure out how to handle it how to bring it out without it just looking dumb like that but it so i think that in this one that's really improved um but to me um the drawback of this one artistically is that the focus is still the w 63 supernova remnant that's what i spent the most time on and i also really loved how um this pair of stars looked with this and then this streamer right here but now this central feature takes up so um little space compared to the overall picture when you compare it to this one where it's really in your face that i feel just artistically it's sort of a wash i don't think that this one is any better uh than this i love how this more fills the frame with interesting stuff to look at and this one it just sort of feels like okay you're drawn right away to that blue center and then your eye doesn't really know where to go next because there's just so much going on um so i i even thought well okay well maybe i could draw the eye better in an sh o version so i did this it's cropped in a little bit um i don't know if it's better i don't i don't like it at this point right now i'm just feeling sick of this so maybe maybe that's why but i i don't like this version that much um i i did release it because i thought i'd get some feedback but uh i don't know i don't like it so uh this is sounding like a downer it's really not meant to be though um i just sort of want to talk through artistically this project since i haven't really before um and i think that i'll wrap it up by saying that even though i'm somewhat disappointed in the result i still find this project really exciting because when you go really deep on a project like this it sort of takes on a life of its own and at some point you just have to accept that your vision and and the reality of what you actually have captured might not always match up but that's okay it can be more about the journey of creating a large project than the final result being the most satisfying part and in any case like i did in 2019 i took a break of all all of 2019 worked on other other things i did a cave a big thing in the on the cave nebula which was fun and so i'm going to be taking a break from this sickness mosaic in 2022 um to work on other things but hopefully in 2023 i'll feel energized to pick it back up with some fresh ideas and uh i'm thinking you know if i could expand it to to some of the more recognizable stuff in sickness like the north america which has a lot of o3 signal maybe that offset of another big blue object will really uh be cool i'm not sure um that would be expanding it mostly down so i'm thinking that might be what i do um rather than just keep going out uh which i'm i'm thinking maybe wasn't the best idea so anyways um this is a very long video i've been working on it now all day and into the night um so you are now seeing the names of all of my patreon supporters um because whenever we have a long video on the channel um you get to see the credit in the credits all of the names of everyone who supports me on patreon so if you want to see your name in the credits on any long video you can sign up over on patreon.com slash nebula photos and in addition to having your name in the credits uh as you're seeing now there are lots of other benefits to joining us uh with us over on patreon um the one one of them is there's a direct chat feature right through patreon so as soon as you sign up you can start chatting with me um but then there's also it's linked to our discord server so that's where you can meet all the people who are already part of patreon all the people who you're seeing now and they'll chat with you too about astrophotography where there's everyone on there is just really dedicated astrophotography people and so i they know you know collectively way more than i do and can help you out with all kinds of things i also organize a monthly imaging challenge um where each month i'm going to give you a challenge like shoot something in a ryan shoot something uh that's a reflection nebula so that kind of thing um so it's a prompt and then you go out and shoot a picture and do it in one month and submit it on the discord server and it's it's a lot of fun and we pick um winners and the winning images each month are published on my instagram and on astro bin i also do monthly zoom chats so this is an opportunity to come in live and ask me questions um i usually do a short presentation we also sometimes have community presentations so if there's something that you feel you want to present on um that's great too um and then there's just a bunch of other stuff i do if there's some exclusive videos that are only on patreon i'm going to be doing some patreon giveaways um they're oh and then new uh also new is we're doing a group imaging project so this is we're all going to be shooting or we all are shooting m 78 messier 78 in a ryan right now and then we're gonna try to put all of our data together and see what we get so i think it's really worth your while to sign up um so you don't miss out on all of this uh activity uh if you're into astrophotography it starts at just one dollar per month um and then there's a three dollar tier and a seven dollar tier and i'm gonna i'm gonna keep it that way i don't i don't plan on really changing it uh for a while at least um but it's been it's been really fun and hopefully you can join us on patreon well until next time this has been nico carver clear skies