Comet Stacking Tutorial and Processing

[TheButcher]

Hey All,

With Comet Atlas on the scene now I thought I would make up a tutorial for how to stack it and process it with DSS and process it with Photoshop. I know many use other programs but maybe you would find one of these videos I made on there helpful. There is no sound, just annotations. I will update some more annotation tomorrow as I just got done doing this. So Enjoy I hope this can explain things a little better as I am still learning as well.


Click Link for Tutorial page.
https://astronebula.com/how-to-stack-co ... de-part-1/

[STEVE333]

Thanks for sharing. That was a lot of effort on your part.

Steve

[TheButcher]

Thanks for sharing. That was a lot of effort on your part.

Steve

Thanks Steve

It was fun doing. As for the time, it wasn't nearly as long as it was to figure out a method and a way to clean up those trails. I spent a few nights thowing a bunch of techniques and Photoshop action sets. They say FFT Action can remove it, But I tried about 3 of them and still a bit of a mess. FFT stands for "Fast Fourier Transform". It is a filter/action used to get rid of/or decrease repeating patterns. I think DSS may have that built into the Option 3 when it tries to combine both the Stars and Comet and says they both come out sharp. But it wasn't working for me, posibly a OSC though, I would be currios and possibly not dithering.

[Graeme1858]

Thanks for that Butcher. Excellent tutorials on a tricky subject!

And if Y4 Atlas is going to get as bright as expected then this is a skill a lot of us are going to need! I was surprised how far the comet moved across the image in a 2 hour imaging session!

Regards

Graeme

[TheButcher]

Thanks for that Butcher. Excellent tutorials on a tricky subject!

And if Y4 Atlas is going to get as bright as expected then this is a skill a lot of us are going to need! I was surprised how far the comet moved across the image in a 2 hour imaging session!

Regards

Graeme

Yeah I it sure does move. I did a small animation of it with only 15 x1 min of exposures for a test and saw how far it moved in 15 minutes and was amazed. But the dithering made the stars move a bit with it. And I couldn't really go more frames because the other filters were used and would be a pain to match them, plus to much time went by when I got back to the same filter in the Sequence. I may try to get some kind of movement animation if the skies permit tonight a long with another capture. RIght now its cloudy, then showers this evening then partly cloudy the rest of the night.

[Graeme1858]

Yeah I it sure does move. I did a small animation of it with only 15 x1 min of exposures for a test and saw how far it moved in 15 minutes and was amazed.

I saw an animation recently, was that yours? It really showed how much the comet moved!

Regards

Graeme

[TheButcher]

Nope, I got to compress it down more it was a large file, plus I want to get the stars stationary. If tonight it gona be crappy with only some patches of clear sky then gona do a straight mono with Lum and go for the animation. I just set the scope up and put a tarp on it incase we get more showers.