10th October 2025

Curiosity fuels every beginning, excitement lives in the unknown...

Over the last few weeks I have mostly been forced to focus on learning how to process images - The night sky has not been my friend. We've had a lot of haze, and cloud and then the full moon. My friend complains about the moon all the time and I never fully comprehended just how much the light from the moon can wash out a target.

An image I took on the night I put my SeestarS50 out and realised the moon was ruining everything

Since My last post:

NGC2070 (Tarantula Nebula) : Data collection Complete. I ended up with 10 h 44m 30s of data and integrated 5h 8m 40s in the final stack (see below 2 examples of this data after processing).

M8 (Lagoon Nebula) : Data Collection at 4h 36m 50s 

IC 434 (Horsehead Nebula) : Data Collection at 4h 5m 30s

NGC 7293 (Eye of God/Helix Nebula) Data Collection at 32m 30s

I have tried several different work flows bought 2 separate books. 

The first one (Pixinsight user guide 2025: the complete guide to transform you astrophotography with professional Image processing techniques by LunarTech Orion) feels like a waste of money - there's some good tidbits of information, but the book is not structured well. 

The second book (Pixinsight Workflows: A step by step guide to astrophpgraphy image processing by Max Dobres) is much more beginner friendly and builds on each step in a more fluid manner. 

This is the first image I created following the first book.


While, this is the first image I created following the second book


Both images used the EXACT same data set. 

I made various other versions trying out different settings but these just followed the basic workflows with settings as advised from each book.

I'm going to stick with the second book for a while and just experiment with different settings to understand how a change in one setting affects  the rest of the workflow.

Looks like more clouds in my near future, I hope to be able to resume the gathering data soon, but alas the skies the limit (literally!).

Clear Skies

Gidy






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