I am a beginner in astronomy and photography. I got my scope this Spring and decided to get a DSLR about a month ago. I have had very limited experience taking images and I first started trying to use Photoshop to process. I could not get anything to look right so I decided to give StarTools a shot and purchased it this week.
Here is one of my first attempts this week. The Swan Nebula is one of my favorite things to look at and I wanted an image. I am doing DSLR short exposure images with a shaky non-guided AltAz mount and tripod. I did use a f6.3 focal reducer on my slow f10 SCT and that seems to help. I like the fact that after a few go arounds with StarTools I manged to get something salvageable as long as I didn't try to twist the knobs to much. I just pretty much followed the work flows in the tutorial videos and let it do its thing.
Please let me know of any thing I can do to improve on this learning process. All criticism is welcome
You might want to post in Gallery for all to see and comment, as well as providing more information about the image/data set. Bias, darks, flats and how these were preprocessed - software used etc. and the ST log for the image so that others can see how it was processed. Otherwise it is an unknown quantity.
I agree with Rowland. The more info you provide, the more we can tell if the image can be improved. Also , if you provide the data, we can try our hand at processing and see if we can improve it. that's a nice image, especially for a beginner. I see it was 60 exposures at 29 seconds. Perhaps, longer exposures for a start. But without knowing what was done in Startools, hard to help much. Good work tho.
Che
edit: you might also want to install the latest version of Startools, 1.4something.
