How Do you Get Nice Looking Stars?

[russellhq]

I've been working on getting the galaxy looking good in my latest capture but the poor stars are getting left behind. I think they look more like polka dots than glowing balls of fire!

Here's a link to the stacked TIFF (this is calibrated with 75 off 5 min lights, captured with the kit in my sig):

https://www.dropbox...._Calibrated.tif

And this is my processing effort:

Any advice or links to a good tutorial would be greatly appreciated!

[Pete Presland]

thats a very nice M51 well done so far! as for the stars, a bit of a newbie myself, but i would image you probably use some sort of layer to protect the stars while processing M51

[Jessun]

That looks like a great job to me as it is! Nice subtle star colour.

I use MartinB's excellent guides for creating a star layer using the dust and scratches tool. Then it's up to the artist behind the keyboard to tweak. It's always a good layer to have.

Look in the imaging tips section for stickies.

/Jesper

[Tim]

Let me know if you find out.............

[Astro_Baby]

I get great looking stars by baking them in an oven at gas regulo seven million for about a million years. You need some hydrogen, helium, juct a pinch of iron and a good quality gravity ( i get mine from gravicom who make the best gravity around using an ancient formula ). Blend the ingredients smoothly and press into the shape of a ball, bake for a few thousan years and voila, perfect stars every time. A nice old duffer with grey hair and a beard gave me this recipe at a star bake off competition a few millennia ago.

If your first few attempts come out over inflated or explode during cooking cut back a bit on the hydrogen, its eay to overdo it.

[ollypenrice]

As Tim impies, it ain't easy to get great stars. You might begin by bribing Peter Shah to let you in on his secrets!

For what it's worth my efforts have led to the following;

Treat the starfield as a separate entity and process it separately as a layer. This only works well for stars not set against nebulosity. In CCD I use RGB only, not LRGB. Use a curve which rises steeply but flattens very early. This gets the background sky to the same level as the main image but keeps the stars small. Comme ca;

You then have to get this starfield layer to have an identical background sky brightness and colour to the original. Use the colour sampler tool in Ps to do this, adjusting in Levels and Curves.

Paste the main image on top and erase the over stretched stars.

That said, I thought your stars were pretty good though they are not perfectly round. Collimation?

Olly

[russellhq]

Collimation could well be out. I've never checked it and have had the scope for over 2 years!