Astrophotography collaboration

[jban28]

I am interested in improving my image processing techniques, but I do not have clear enough skies or good enough equipment to capture my own images to process. If anyone is interested in sharing their unprocessed images so that I can practise editing them I would be grateful, thanks

[Galactic Wanderer]

I would definitely be happy sharing mine. Is M13 ok? And do you want to be able stack them?

[swag72]

If you take a look on the Deep Sky West website, they have some data there that they have for people to download and process.

[ollypenrice]

It's easy to offer calibrated linear stacks but offering the hudreds of darks, flats, bias and lights would be another matter in terms of bandwidth.

Olly

[jban28]

1 hour ago, ollypenrice said:

It's easy to offer calibrated linear stacks but offering the hudreds of darks, flats, bias and lights would be another matter in terms of bandwidth.

Olly

That's a good point. How far along the processing would you have to be to have small enough files. Would I still be able to adjust individual colour channels, or would I be limited just to photoshop editing (brightness, contrast, etc.)

3 hours ago, Galatic Wanderer said:

I would definitely be happy sharing mine. Is M13 ok? And do you want to be able stack them?

Yes any images would be great. I'm not sure based on what ollypenrice said ^^ It depends on how large the files are.

[ollypenrice]

Just now, jban28 said:

That's a good point. How far along the processing would you have to be to have small enough files. Would I still be able to adjust individual colour channels, or would I be limited just to photoshop editing (brightness, contrast, etc.)

Yes any images would be great. I'm not sure based on what ollypenrice said ^^ It depends on how large the files are.

If post-processing is your area of interest then you'd really want to start with the channels, which might be luminance, red, green, blue and H alpha. (Maybe OIII as well.) Six fies wouldn't be a problem via Dropbox. I'll have a look in the broom cupboard!

Olly

[jban28]

3 hours ago, swag72 said:

If you take a look on the Deep Sky West website, they have some data there that they have for people to download and process.

How do I view/edit the .fit files they have?

[swag72]

2 minutes ago, jban28 said:

How do I view/edit the .fit files they have?

It's on the front page of their website if you google them .............. But here it is http://deepskywest.com/giveaway/

[jban28]

4 minutes ago, ollypenrice said:

If post-processing is your area of interest then you'd really want to start with the channels, which might be luminance, red, green, blue and H alpha. (Maybe OIII as well.) Six fies wouldn't be a problem via Dropbox. I'll have a look in the broom cupboard!

Olly

It would certainly be good to start with at least. Thanks for your help :-)

[ollypenrice]

1 minute ago, jban28 said:

How do I view/edit the .fit files they have?

Many people use Fits Liberator. I don't, I just convert Fits to TIFF in AstroArt but Fits Liberator is free. Don't ask me how it works!! https://www.spacetelescope.org/projects/fits_liberator/

I have a nice simple Wild Duck widefield dataset I'll share on here for beginners. My final version looked like this.

The files will take a while top upload so it will be a few hours before I can post the Dropbox link.

Olly

 

[jban28]

1 minute ago, swag72 said:

It's on the front page of their website if you google them .............. But here it is http://deepskywest.com/giveaway/

Yes I found the files, but I don't have any applications which will open the .fit files. I'm just waiting for GIMP to install, because I read somewhere that that works, but if you know of any others that I could try that would be helpful. (Also, just looked at the image gallery on your website, very impressive!)

[swag72]

I use CCDStack to open fits files and convert them to tiffs to then use in Photoshop...... there's free fits software out there, such as fits liberator for example, but not sure they allow you to save the fit as as a different format.

[jban28]

5 minutes ago, ollypenrice said:

Many people use Fits Liberator. I don't, I just convert Fits to TIFF in AstroArt but Fits Liberator is free. Don't ask me how it works!! https://www.spacetelescope.org/projects/fits_liberator/

I have a nice simple Wild Duck widefield dataset I'll share on here for beginners. My final version looked like this

The files will take a while top upload so it will be a few hours before I can post the Dropbox link.

Olly

 

Thanks Olly, that's really helpful. Just waiting for fits liberator to download :-)

[ollypenrice]

Practice files from the Wild Duck Cluster.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/wxi190mpffj2rm5/BLUE 5X10.tif?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/49rv9gyuhrh9lut/GREEN 5X10.tif?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/s0s6440jjfs6o2z/RED 5X10.tif?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/9usucu8rv6cwts4/LUM 5X10.tif?dl=0

OK, I hope those work. You have blue, green, red and luminance which have been calibrated with Bad Pixel Map, bias subtraction and flat fields. (I don't use conventional darks.)

They come from this instrument, a TEC 140 Triplet Apo with TEC flattener, focal length 1015mm, riding on an Avalon Linear Fast Reverse. Just 5x10 minutes per filter, so nothing exotic.

You'll need to align them, combine the RGB, work on the colour balance, remove gradients, stretch etc. The standard processing jobs. You'll get a good taste of the southern Milky Way from the summer months here. We're at Lat 44.19 N.

Olly

[Galactic Wanderer]

[jban28]

Thanks for your help everyone :-)