Ad Astra Observatory

Hilltop Observatory got a few clear nights to play around with the new software rig. The “capture” part of the process is decently well-behaved already — I almost have plate solving working in the new sequencing software.

The “stacking” and “processing” part of the program is still pretty broken. I picked up a copy of Adobe Lightroom 6, hoping that I could use the minimalist Photoshop tools to do the stuff I do (I don’t use more than 8 of the many menu functions in PS), but I haven’t quite got the hang of it, yet. Also, PS is now a subscription model, which pains me, so I’m trying to figure out how to do what needs to be done, here.

Anyway, I had an ever-growing stack of data filling my hard drive, so I thought I’d process some and see what I got. I don’t think that this is my best work of bringing out the beauty in the really pretty RAW frames, but it’s what I have, at the moment.

This is one hour, three 20m subframes, of the pretty M65/M66 pair of galaxies in Leo. Cassie’s FOV is too small to bring in the third “triplet” in the area. The RAW frames were stunning.

Here’s the stack:

This is Lightroom to edit the RAW, then apply same to the rest of the frames, export as TIFF. Then Nebulosity 4 to stack (unregistered, thus the diagonal lines still). Then back to Lightroom for final tweaks and adding the caption. In PS, you add a caption as a single text layer, so everything lines up and is the same size and everything. In LR, you have to pretend you’re doing a slideshow, add individual lines of the caption separately, thus the melange of sizes and alignments. Then you export the “slide” as a JPEG. Can you feel my eyes rolling?

OMG, I didn’t even see the grey border. I am beside myself.
It’s enough to make a body want to pay for PS.

Stumbling along, we’ll get better again. This time, the capture part of the rig feels fairly solid. But that’s another show.