Help - Need help for processing Milky Way

[Pangolino Astronomico]

Hi all,

I have 30 photos of a small portion of the milky way taken with a Canon EOS 500D with exposure 2 mins, ISO 800, f/4. I stacked them using Siril (I have a Mac so I cannot use DSS) using 10 darks, 50 flats and 50 biases. I tried processing it with Photoshop, but I can't get a good result as I am new to astrophotography. I want to understand if the photos themselves are bad or if I only need to learn to process them. Can you help me process it? Do you have any tips on the camera settings I used? I attach the fits file of the stacked image from Siril and the png image that I obtained (I know it sucks).

result_3240s.fit

[TiffsAndAstro]

i'm just in the middle of doing a tiny crop (not much sign of stacking artefacts at edges) and a background extraction and noise reduction in graxpert and extracting stars/background back in siril/starnet++.  so far, looks pretty nice to me, but i am a beginner

Edited August 25 by TiffsAndAstro

[TiffsAndAstro]

ok im not winning any prizes for my processing skills, but your image is boatloads better than my first and only attempt. 

all i did in addition to the above was a +20 asinh on the seperated stars before combining them back with the background.

its possible the stars lack a little focus maybe, but i think they're pretty good for a camera lens. 

remember i'm new to this, so bare that in mind  there are quite a lot of triangular artefacts in my result, possibly from starnet++ removal process, possible inherent in the data. but this took me like 5 mins

 

Edited August 25 by TiffsAndAstro

[TiffsAndAstro]

if i zoom in, i can see donut stars, so focus definitely not perfect. pretty great image even so lol

Edited August 25 by TiffsAndAstro

[Pangolino Astronomico]

@TiffsAndAstro thank you, that looks better. I'm still new to post processing, but it's good to hear that the photos are nice 😄

[TiffsAndAstro]

1 minute ago, Pangolino Astronomico said:

@TiffsAndAstro thank you, that looks better. I'm still new to post processing, but it's good to hear that the photos are nice 😄

me too. check some videos on siril processing, there's nothing i did which is very complicated. and im very much still learning. looks like you're making a solid start though. 

[Pangolino Astronomico]

@TiffsAndAstro thank you, I will check that out.