Half of the battle of taking a good astrophoto isn’t taking the photo – it’s the post processing!

I’ve always been fairly confident in my ability to capture a target – the big thing for me this year has been learning how best to process this data into a final image.

This image is made up of 60 five minute sub exposures – which taken directly from the camera look like this:

These subframes then have flat and dark frames extracted to remove unwanted noise and artifacts and are then stacked to improve the signal to noise ratio.

Once that process is complete, the fun work starts – the post processing!

I use a piece of software called PixInsight for this – and whilst it has a steep learning curve, it really is an exeptional tool in the astrophotographers arsenal.

I’ve processed this image of The Bubble Nebula twice – once using traditional methods, and the second using Luke Newbould and Bill Blanshan’s HOO false colour method.

Click on the images to show the full resolution version.