Deep Sky Stacker - Saving file

[Guest]

Hi, I took some pictures of M31 last night and then stacked them using Deep Sky Stacker. When it finished stacking it presented me a picture which was not brilliant but it was ok. However if I save that picture as a TIF or look at the autosave TIF file they don't look like the picture presented to me at the end of stacking.  They are much darker and you can only see the brighter stars. Why is that?

I hadn't done any stretching using DSS. It was just the straight picture directly after stacking. My plan was to use something else to do the stretching.

Cheers

Steve

 

[happy-kat]

You are there with your thoughts, it is the later processing and stretching that reveals the image. 

[Adam1234]

Don't worry, that is normal, DSS normally displays it as a stretched image I think so you can inspect your results. You need to take that autosave.tif and open it in photoshop/GIMP etc and then start stretching it. This should then start bringing out the detail

[Guest]

Thanks, 

Just playing around with the stretching using GIMP. It's amazing how tenuous the outer parts of M31 are compared to the core. I have to stretch it a lot before I can see it and by then the core is incredibly washed out.

 

[happy-kat]

Take the stretch in little steps, have a look at the stargazine episodes and budgetastro on YouTube is another place to start from as most stuff in Photoshop can be done in GIMP