September interesting snaps

[KAYCE]

Hi  from Kayce,photo taken 9pm 19th not sure what the object's are ? would be great to find out thanks Kayce.

[furrysocks2]

What direction were you facing, how high up in the sky?

[KAYCE]

Hi yes facing west,quite high not far from polaris area.

[furrysocks2]

I had to adjust the levels to bring out a few background stars... it matched on nova.astrometry.net pretty quickly.

Sound right if you were up near Polaris.

 

[KAYCE]

Great to know what I was seeing,still a novice,thanks Ken.

[KAYCE]

Also took this one 9pm 19th,how 2  blue object's close to-gether, looking West,40%.

[KAYCE]

I think the white object must be a planet,not sure though.

[furrysocks2]

 

[furrysocks2]

I suggest downloading GIMP (unless you already have Photoshop or similar), then you can stretch histograms before uploading to do the "plate solving" above.

I can give you a run through if you like, or google.

 

[furrysocks2]

Cool... you got a double star.

http://earthsky.org/brightest-stars/epsilon-lyrae-the-famous-double-double-star

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epsilon_Lyrae

[KAYCE]

I shall download GIMP,oh that's great a double Star,I am using Nikon D5300,last night time lapse about 3 seconds,

 on my tripod quite chuffed now,thanks for your interest,will send some snaps to facebook.

[Starlight 1]

Look like you are having fun .so my set up shot as I still not up and running for this winter. so you seen this N/E about 9 ish

[furrysocks2]

Five minute instructions for how to do what I did above...

 

 

Open pic in GIMP.

Then you can either use menu item Colors>Levels... or Colors>Curves... to play with how black blackish stuff apears and how light lighter stuff appears, you're just trying to find a balance to make barely bright things appear brighter and keep dark looking dark enough... probably make more sense when you try it.

For example... the original, having opened the Levels... dialog but not tweaked anything yet:

After a little tweak in the "Levels..." dialog (this is actually a pretty big tweak):

And the same sort of thing with the "Curves..." dialog:

 

All you're trying to do is get some of the really faint stuff from the blackness to appear visible, but you don't want the "black" background to overwhelm the image by making it too bright. This is a common technique to help make nebulosity and galaxies etc appear in images where they're otherwise very faint. Drag the sliders or curves around and see what change they make. You typically don't move them as much as I have done above, so google if you want to understand the process better.

 

Then you "plate solve" to tell what part of the sky you were looking at. You can get software on your own computer to do this but if you're going to upload an image to nova.astrometry.net, try and keep it under 1MB - it doesn't like massive files and it's not fair on the servers. If it has too few stars it might struggle, hence "stretching" it a bit to make a few more appear before uploading.

That said, once you get the hang of imaging and longer exposures, etc... you probably won't need to find out what you're looking at. But for a novice, have a go and play around, it's all good.

[KAYCE]

That is great to see,I will try and get my head around this,good of you,Ken.

[furrysocks2]

Pleasure. Hope it's not too much, but given a pic that you're not sure of, great to be able to execute a couple of simple steps to work it out.

All the best, clear skies!

Matt.

[KAYCE]

Hi Matt,Downloaded GIMP,would be gratefull for some help on what I next need to do,have had my image loaded but not sure the stages

to alter the black to the image which you had finalised,I have been clicking on levels etc,if you wish I can let you have my email

for instructions,may be easier knowing my next move.Thanks Ken

[furrysocks2]

Let's keep it on the thread in case it helps anyone else.

 

OK, let's start by opening the very first image you posted on this thread in GIMP.

Then open the "Colours->Curves..." dialog box. You should see this:

The white line is the curve you can alter. The black spike near the left tells you that most of the image is dark, which is obvious.

Drag the curve until it looks like this:

 

Please tell me what you can see...

[KAYCE]

am I to use the box you have put here ?

[furrysocks2]

Not sure what you mean, I'm just little screenshots up to show you the windows that GIMP opens on my screen. When you're looking at the image in GIMP, and you click the "Colours" menu and select the "Curves..." menu item, it should open up another window and you click in that... by clicking on the white line and dragging it around, you should be able to see the image in the main GIMP window change brightness.

All I'm trying to show with this step is that by changing the curve, you can make the dark bits of your image brighter, and in those dark bits, there are a few slightly-not-so-dark spots which are stars... you can't see them in the original, but by using the "Curves..." tool, you can make them appear. The next step, once you've made the faint stars (and all the black background) lighter, is to keep the faint stars bright but make the background dark again.

I hope this is not too confusing... the aim was just to show you how to take the original image which appeared to only show 4 or so stars and bring out a few more to help the "plate solver" identify the portion of sky. There's lots you can do with these sorts of techniques, also lots you can do without it. Happy to carry on but only if it interests you.

[KAYCE]

Matt thanks for the reply,will have a go and see how I get on,I am a bit slow on the uptake but I will get there in the end,I have a great deal of 

images I can make more interesting,gratefull for your help.Ken.

Will eventually let you know how I am doing.

[KAYCE]

Ah yes managed something close to what you had achieved,think this will be great,will be playing

around now with other images,should find more detail from my library,allways something to learn.

Just wondering what all the other item's on GIMP can do.Thanks Ken.

from a sunny Leicester.

[furrysocks2]

No problem. It's a rainy-day exercise, if the skies are clear go observe and image!

I was trying to find a video on youtube for you... this one uses Photoshop not GIMP and he talks a lot, so maybe turn the sound off and ignore most of his clicks, but watch how he improves the image from start to finish just by playing around with curves and levels...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnPII6YdVBc

 

[furrysocks2]

Try playing around with levels and curves in GIMP with this image:

http://www.casimages.com/i/170921081235577642.jpg.html

Click the link, and then click again the image in the middle of the page and it should open up full size, then right-click and save the image. Then load it in GIMP.

I think in qualitative terms, it's not a very "good" image to start with. It's in "jpg" format for a start, which compresses the data so not "lossless". But I thought it might be fun for you to play with in GIMP if you're in the mood, because you can quite quickly bring out colour and structure in the image that you wouldn't think was there just by looking at the original.