Cassiopeia to Andromeda

[Mognet]

The star field here is so rich in a stacked image that the constellation of Cassiopeia on the right gets lost in a sea of stars. The Andromeda Galaxy and the Double Cluster still stand out nicely

Taken in the early hours of 9th November 2018, just after the streetlights went out. Nikon D3100, Nikkor 35mm prime, ISO 1600, f2.5. 60 subs of 9 seconds each stacked in Sequator and then processed in GIMP

[Ruud]

Stars, clusters, galaxies, they're all there. Wonderful!

I have a tip. In photoshop I made a black and white layer of which I blended the luminosity down to your image. In the B&W layer I set the magentas to black. To remove the coloured noise I made the reds and greens a bit darker till the noise  didn't show any more, and I made the yellows lighter. Making the blues slightly darker also helped. I intended to leave the cyans alone (at zero) but accidentally hit that slider too, just a tiny bit. The result is in the the zip file.

cass-andr.zip

I'm pretty sure you can do these things in GIMP as well. It's a quick fix, but our accomplished imagers would probably opt for an entirely different approach!

 

[Mognet]

Thanks. I haven't gone too deeply into processing techniques yet, but it certainly looks worth it to control the noise which is where I suspect the magentas in the background are coming from. I'm still learning, and I've only recently found how to get consistant results from the basic setup I use. Understanding processing beyond the use of flats and careful stretching is something I need to work on

It looks like you are using a large monitor too, which I assume is properly calibrated. I do my processing on a laptop, and I've never been too certain of the colour accuracy on it

[happy-kat]

Just thought I'd share, I've found Sequator great when I've got foreground in my image but if soley a star field I prefer DSS as I've found Sequator emphasises any chromatic aberration my lens might have a gives purple a boost.

[Mognet]

Thanks Kat. I'll give it a try in DSS. My usual lens has some pincushion distortion that Sequator can cater for. I haven't seen if that's possible under DSS yet. Another thing I could try is to generate some TIFFs from the raw files using something that offers lens correction profiles and then run them through DSS

[happy-kat]

I'd process the raw files in DSS and then if needed look to correct any lens distortion on just the final image using some editing program. The best data is in the raw files for stacking I think. You might find you could just do the lens correction on the final image using Sequator.