We held the first part of our Introduction to Astro-imaging course this evening via Zoom and YouTube.

This is the 4th part of our 4-Steps programme. The first part of it covered basic imaging techniques. You can watch the video of the session on our YouTube channel, and also embedded below.

You can download sample data to try out the processing techniques yourself. Links to software are on our links page. Better yet, go out an take you own pictures with whatever equipment you’ve got. It’s very satisfying!

Download sample data »

These are unprocessed frames of the Moon, Sun and widefield stars (saved as JPEGs for simplicity) so that you can try to process them and get similar – or hopefully better – results than Andrew and I did.

Software

The software we used and mentioned were:

  • Adobe Lightroom (£) – well known to photographers
  • Adobe Photoshop (£) – probably the best general image processing
  • Registax (free) – for sharpening (wavelets are the best!) and basic image manipulation, normally used for lunar and planetary stacking and processing
  • GIMP (free) – a free alternative to Photoshop, has many of the same features but interface may be a little trickier and not so full-featured