This very interesting region in Norma contains many HII features as well as many other interesting objects. Below you can see an annotated version with the most clearly visible objects identified, except for the HII region in the bottom left corner. I couldn’t find out what this is called, so if anyone knows please let me know in the comments below 🙂 Somehow these objects and this fov get rarely imaged, which made it all…
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When working with bright objects in images we run the risk to clip signal while processing, or the signal might already be clipped to begin with. For big features that are really bright we can take images at different exposure times and use HDR processing to make sure we have all the information there and a good looking final image. However, sometimes we might not realise this happening or it is just some small features….
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This is a 3 panel wide field mosaic of NGC6604, M16 and M17 in H-alpha, OIII and RGB. Also in the same field of view are M18 and IC4701, along with a view more open star clusters and nebulas. It was my main project on my astrotrip to Namibia this year and I spent the first 5 nights collecting the data for this. The end result is a highly detailed image of 20378 x 11160…
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Learn how to use AutoHotkey to assign your own keyboard shortcuts to Processes in PixInsight
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For a lot of processes in PixInsight you’ll have some basic values for the settings you want to use or at least start with, every time. But how do you remember these values? If you are anything like me you’ve written them down somewhere, or stored a bookmark to some article that discusses certain values. Every time you use the process you need to look up these values. Wouldn’t it be great if you could…
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Which is better: many short exposures or fewer long exposures? This question get’s asked a lot and it might seem complicated. The short answer is; don’t worry about exposure length if you are imaging under light polluted skies. If you are lucky enough to be under dark skies, then fewer but longer exposures will be better in terms of SNR than more shorter exposures.
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When working in PixInsight you probably make use of Previews a lot. And I really mean a lot! Most processes can take quite a bit of trial and error to get the right settings and fine tune them for the optimal result. We run these processes on previews so that it is much faster to see the effects compared to running it on the complete picture. Furthermore, we can use multiple copies of the same…
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We all know Pixar (Animation Studios) for the funny, witty, touching animation movies. Part of the reason these movies are so good is the focus on excellent story telling. And these stories are told with excellent quality standards and the focus on all the little details. But what does Pixar have to do with astrophotography, I hear you ask. Well, one could make some philosophical point about story telling in (astro)photography I guess, but the…
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There is an easy way to increase the performance of PixInsight by optimising the swap file storage. I’ll explain a bit more about what it is and what it does, along with my personal tests and results in this article. For those who are just interested in the improvement I’ll start with the short instruction what you’ll need to do. Add Swap storage directories In PixInsight, go to Edit -> Global Preferences. This will open…
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Using a Nikon DSLR on external power can be really convenient and luckily solutions for this are available.
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