Help with light pollution/noise?

[Costas Soler]

Hi! I have just received a new 8" orion newtonian astrograph. I have taken my first ever deep sky photographs with it, and they have come out more or less ok. I was wondering if you had any suggestions on what functions to carry out to limit the noise you can see in these pictures, and possibly reduce the effect of light pollution. As for light pollution, I have to say that for the time being I've been getting pummeled by the full moon, so for these individual shots I understand if there's not much to do. Also, sorry if I'm making newbie mistakes, I am as new as you can possibly be to astrophotography, and these are the first photos I've ever taken with a dedicated astrophotography setup.

Thanks!

 

[kendg]

2 words. More data. 

Other than that, you're off to a good start 

[alacant]

Instead of taking single snaps take say 20 and stack them in e.g. deep sky stacker. This will remove most of the noise. HTH

[Costas Soler]

Thanks! By the way, do you have any suggestions on any good stacking software for Macs?

[alacant]

Pixinsight. But by the time you've bought the licence you could have got a cheap windows tablet or laptop and be using a choice of free software e.g. Deep Sky Stacker instead. It may save you a lot of pain further down the line too when the Mac version just doesn't quite make it. Just our €0.02. HTH.

[cjdawson]

For stacking on a mac, I found that the simplest solution was to create a virtual machine with VMWare, then install windows in that, this way you get to be able to run programs like DSS.  If VMWare is too expensive, try virtual box, as it's free.  You will need a licence for windows, but I'm sure you can figure that out ;-)