StarTools

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

M17 - http://www.astrobin.com/191807/

Thanks,
Bill

Looks good Bill.

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.

Thanks, I have posted in the gallery.

Just a thought. You might try deconvolution. Try playing with the radius setting. On some of my images, it makes a big difference.
Che