For me personally this is the most valuable youtube video ive seen. Ive been trying to figure out processing on gimp for over a year. People only ever show mainstream programs. Please do more vids with gimp. Ive a backlog of images that i can now attempt to process properly. Thankyou Thankyou Thankyou. Great content on your channel 👏
I know it's been 2 years since this video but I am SO thankful I found this. I now have a DSLR, I have a tripod I can use, and although I can't go to a dark sky site, I am excited to try doing this either way. Thank you so much for this!
This is excellent. A proper old-school tutorial. It's so nice to have a video that explains things rather than cutting everything down to 7 minutes of flashy shortcuts and bad jokes to avoid scaring off casual RUclips viewers with zero interest in the subject. I can't claim any great knowledge of the mysteries of astrophotography, but there's one thing I do know: the 'g' in GIMP - GNU [wildebeest] - comes from Xhosa and has a silent 'g', so it ought to be pronounced 'noo', rather than 'gernoo'. Think of the 'g' in gnu like the 'k' in knee, knot and knuckle. Millions may disagree, but millions may also be wrong... 🤭
Wow, you really know how to work those layers! My worst subject, 😁 that and masks, when to use them and where to put them. Id need a 4-year degree to get that mastered the way you already have. I will save this and use the heck out of it, over and over. Thanks, Nico! Beautiful work, thanks for helping us rookies out. Also, thank you for the notification!!! 😁 I think you feel me. 👍
This series of tutorials of photographing tracked and untracked DSOs along with processing them using a variety of software is outstanding and utterly useful. Great presentation, thoroughly explained and you even provide files for us to play around with ourselves while waiting for our own clear skies. Very inspiring.
Thanks so much for this video. I have been wanting to try this ever since I saw a post about in earlier this year. Took the opportunity of some dark skies last week and photographed Andromeda following your directions. Couldn't get starnet++ to produce anything other than completely black image so used dust and scratches filter in Affinity. Worked really well. All very clearly explained thank-you.
This video was really helpful. Using masks in GIMP has always been a mystery to me and now I at least, sort of, understand it. Thank you so much for posting this.
Thanks for a great tutorial. Only just started to try and perform processing on my images. I'm going to have to watch that a few times though for it to sink in...👍
I just tested it out (instead of going to bed because it's always when you SHOULD go to bed that you become suddenly motivated and efficient). It greatly enhanced my final shot, thank you very much! Now that I have a 55-250, I can't wait to go shoot some more of M31 with a greater resolution than my 50mm. Your video will stay at arms lenght for a long time! Thank you again!
Sweet! I literally just got a new machine setup a few days ago and now I can start using this tutorial and also give it a go! Looking forward to trying a second attempt at M31! Clear Skies!
Thank You Thank You. I have spent months trying to process my images with Gimp and i have learned more in this one video than in all that time. Now i am going to put this new learning to my past data and to check out your Siril videos, been using it for years and now with the new scripts its even better.
Thank you very much for this extraordinary tutorial. Tell you my son lives in Boston, in Brookline. He works as a Molecular Biologist at Harvard. I live in Spain. A greeting.
Thank you so much for this! As a beginner in deep sky this really is an invaluable step by step process for images very accessible to me and my equipment. Cannot thank you enough for this!!!
Nico, this has been a super useful video. I love the detail of explanation that will allow me to go and try this myself as a complete novice. Thank you.
I agree with Mark Chapman!! Most useful video yet, I wasn't sure how to save a TIFF file so I could post to social media, well now I know how to make it pop and post it LOL Thanks Nico you are the best
I really appreciate the sample file you included for practice! I followed along step by step and am amazed at the result on my first try. Hopefully I'll be able to get out and get my own pictures soon.
Thank you so much my friend! First time even attempting Andromeda and boy do I need to figure out how to use my Bahtinov mask! Lol. Wonderful videos and I'll definitely be checking this out again when I retry Andromeda (as soon as the moon goes away in a week or two). Clear skies and thanks again!
That is a brutally good result considering no tracking, holy damn. I use tracking and I've not gotten results nearly as good as this, mine are a bit less noisy due to longer exposure times but you've got so much detail! Holy, gonna follow this next time I photograph andromeda and maybe I'll pick up a few new things in terms of post processing.
I love your videos! the best astrophotography tutorials in the web. Could be possible to do a tutorial for the Milky Way, please. Thanks for the for sharing your knowledge.
Hi David, I had planned to do a milky way video this summer, but I didn't get to it, so it probably won't happen till next summer. I did do Milky Way at 50mm: ruclips.net/video/zRp3Qu_0K6o/видео.html , but didn't go in to including landscape. I'd say the key to Milky Way is an interesting, dark location. Clear skies, Nico
Sir lots of love from india. Plz make more more astronomy tutorials. Plz make them on dslr+star tracker+ DSS+ gimp Many of us only use this object and softwares. Plz sir make more and more capturing and editing videos on this things. Want to see more nebula and clusters of Messier series.
Wow! What a great series of videos. I have just been playing around so far with astrophotography, and done some stacking, and post processing. I've had results which I am happy with, but could easily be seen as being, "amateur." Your shot looks amazing, by comparison, and the previous video and this one have shown me how to take my hobby to the next level, from stuff I look at, and am happy with, and friends and family kind of pat me on the back over, to stuff which would probably wow a good chunk of people who don't know a lot about astrophotography. That said, if anyone says, "how do you do that," or, "it must cost a fortune to get something like that," well...I just point them to your video, and they too could start having, "wow," photos. There are a lot of good astro people on YT, and you have just shot up into those ranks, in my book, with this tutorial series! I'm sad I haven't really watched your videos before now. My loss. Thanks!
This is a very informative video....would you please consider doing a couple for more separate tutorials in Gimp for diffuse nebula like the Pelican and also Star Clusters in RGB. Also how to get good coloured stars and protection with masking in these situations.....thank you.❤️😊
I don't have my own camera or setup (yet), but I did find a website that offered the raw file data so you could practice. Downloaded the files for M42 and M31, and along with this tutorial and a few others on your channel, I was able to post-process some amazing looking photos. You made it simple and easy to work along with. Here's to hoping I have just as much luck when I start snapping my own frames!
In all tutorials on DSS I see people load files using the UI, and then they show you need to check them. If you drag your images from explorer onto the DeepSkyStacker window, DSS will ask you what kind of files they are (light,dark,bias,etc) AND it will automatically check them in the list. I never use the UI to load files ;)
Hey Nico, thanks for your effort in teaching these techniques! I have found it a great help. I wondered if you have a tutorial for using Affinity photo for processing, this is what I use and can’t quite get satisfying results. Thanks👍🏼
Thanks again for the amazing tutorial! I just need to figure out where Andromeda is. Can't pin point it from where I live, maybe it's the light pollution.
@@NebulaPhotos Green laser? Hmm...lemme look into that. Thank you again for the awesome videos, these have rekindled my love for night sky photography. I loved when I captured Orion Nebula on my first try!
@@nickdsnik1675 I tried so many time like this, I could only see so many stars, but no smudge. It is either really small for my camera or really faint seen from my city. I hope I get to go to some low light polluted place with clearer skies. Thanks BTW.
@@BrajendraVikramSingh I talk a bit about using a green laser and other finder devices here: ruclips.net/video/AKKlzbgQStE/видео.html
4 года назад+2
Hi Nico! I am Francisco Gonçalves, from Madeira Islands - Portugal! Congratulations for the videos! They are really amazing! I saw this one and the others about Lagoon nebula and the edition in PixInsight. You are a really good comunicator and very compreensive on the explanations! Tomorrow will be my first attempt to get a photo from Andromeda. I have a old russian lens: Rubinar 1000mm, f/10, do you think is a good focal distance to use? I have a Nikon D810. If not a have a 70-200 f/2.8. Thanks in advance!
Hi Francisco, Thanks! Unfortunately I think 1000mm f/10 is too long/slow for this method. If you have a different lens that would be better. Under f/4 and under 300mm is best. Clear skies, Nico PS/ your 1000mm lens would be good to try on Jupiter, Saturn, and the Moon
4 года назад
@@NebulaPhotos thanks a lot! Will use my 70-200 f/2.8 with my D810 in crop mode. Thanks a lot Nico!
Excellent video. I am doing what you told in the video. I am shooting with 50mm lens with a crop canon camera. What should be the star threshold ? I have made 116 stars. But I finally crop the image very less no of stars there. Any suggestions? Thank you
It might be stacking on noise, esp. if you were a bit out of focus. If you open one light frame in GIMP, perhaps you can estimate the number of stars in the image, and then use that to fine tune the threshold in DSS. Clear skies, Nico
Great tutorial! Love them please keep it up!! One question, I seem to be getting a lot of gradients in my final stacks(reddish green tint) is that something to fix in settings? I usually stack in super pixel mode with a median filter checked to reduce noise, those were the only differences I noticed from my settings to yours
Hi Joe, if it's a gradient it is most likely light pollution and is truly part of the picture so can't be eliminated with stacking settings. Check out my Orion No Trackers videos for a light pollution gradient removal method in Photoshop or GIMP.
Last Friday I got over 3000 frames of Andromeda at 300mm, and have been trying to stack them, but technology hates me. My first stack DSS crashed, my second Sequator output a corrupted file, my third DSS didn't actually output any files for some reason, and I've had to cancel another this morning because Windows refused to connect to wifi without a reboot and I needed to work on an essay which I had saved on Google Docs. Fingers crossed that I can finally get that damn image stacked and processed, so I can move onto the frames I got of the Pleiades on the same night. It was the one clear night in a huge swath of nights which were plagued by wildfire smoke, so I'm looking forward to the results.
@@NebulaPhotos Makes sense, especially since I'm stuck with my laptop for now, which has less storage space and is not as powerful as my desktop. If the stack I currently have running fails again, I'll try to stack fewer images or stack in a few batches which I could then combine. This is the first time I've tried this many files in DSS, I used mostly Sequator in the past which is great if you want something fast and easy but doesn't have as many advanced options.
I'm following this tutorial step by step, thank you for such a great explanation. My only problem is, once you start to stretch the image, and later the separate colors, my image histogram is almost flat to the left. i can't distinguish the separate color channels. Did I do something wrong? I have a modded DSLR with the low pass filter removed.
I need something to help focus because making it starless just won’t work. They’re too fuzzy. It takes out most of them but there’s a few small guys left.
I had a problem with gimp ... whenever I curve and stretch the image ... it becomes green and a big green circle and lots of vignette appears . What do I do ?
I took with white handkerchief over lens in daytime . I have A LOT OF VIGNETTING IN ALL MY IMAGES , even with flats of the same settings of light frames
@@drrach1 flats should NOT be same settings as lights, you likely have very overexposed flats in that case that would not correct vignetting and cause more problems than not using them. Try stacking without them to see. Flats should be taken at same ISO as lights, but shutter speed will be much shorter and is adjusted so that the histogram (or exposure meter) is in the middle. Clear skies, Nico
Hi Cliff, If you are on a Mac and not on an administrator account, try running it with the word 'sudo' in front of the command, and see if it asks you for your computer's password. If so, type it in, and press enter.
Is there going to be a 2d with Photoshop? :D I can follow along fine in PS until we get to the layer masks, and then it all falls to pieces. The programs are different enough for me to get confused :S Anyway, love your series. Subscribed!
I followed your instructions and downloaded the M31 data but my core is bright and a little large. Any idea what steps are needed to make to correct the image. I enjoyed this and hope you have more images for us beginners to try.
I have a technique for repairing a blown out core where you save a version of the image with a lesser stretch and then blend in the core details from the lesser stretched version with the more aggressively stretched version using layer masks. Not sure if that comes across in text. I show the technique a bit in my first Orion video series.
Sir i have a problem in opening my images in DSS I captured M31 using my telescope and mobile phone camera The jpeg images are opening on dss It is showing "can not open multiple files from this folder" Please help sir🙏
I used my 55-200mm f/4-5.6 on Nikon D3300 @ 200mm f/5.6 and captured 850x1" lights and 60 each of darks, bias and flats. Stacked in DSS and it detected only 41 stars for stacking. Anyway, as I selected to stack best 80% of images, it did stack 668 images. Final result turned out to be uh... a bit underwhelming. I processed my image in GIMP. Just to get more details out, I had to stretch even further than what Nico showed in this video. In the end it was extremely noisy. I had to stop there as I couldn't use Starnet++ on my windows laptop because it gave me error because it couldn't find some .dll files. So my question is, if I am limited by my lens for this? Or can I still get something better out of my lens. I also have a 50mm f/1.8 prime lens. I can use it, but it will produce a wide field image and M31 would be a tiny part of the image.
Yes, keep experimenting. With a f/1.8 lens you will be letting in something like 5x more light with each shot which will really help with noise. Yes, M31 will be small in the field, but still clearly visible and it can be cool to see it in context with M33
I feel your pain. I have the same lens and ran into your same issue at 200mm. I've been experimenting with dialing back the zoom. 85mm landed me at f/4.5, which is miles better than f/5.6. I am currently try to process ~400 2 second lights at 100mm, which is also f/4.5. I've been waiting for what seems like forever for this video to be posted (THANK YOU, NICO!!!). I can get a decent image in GIMP on the first pass, but I am struggling with StarNet++, as well. I'm getting no where even close to what Nico has posted. Early days, though. We'll get there. I'll try Nico's idea to drop down to some faster glass, but a shorter focal length (50mm for me). That will be interesting. I'm not even sure if I'll find Andromeda in the Live View at 50mm! HAHAHAHAAHHA
@@NebulaPhotos Thanks Nico. Your tutorials are the best of what I have come across on RUclips. I'll give it another try with my 50mm f/1.8 Clear skies!
@@HighNoonan So with smaller focal lengths and wider aperture of f/4.5 is able to capture better images. I will give that a go. Is there a chance we could see your final picture? Are you able to get the starless image processed in Starnet++? I'm unable to even load my image in the application. Anyway, I'm just getting started. Hopefully it will only get better. Clear skies!
I greatly appreciate all your tutorials. I vividly follow all your videos as they always cover some of the questions I have. I personally just started with astrophotography and there are some problems I can not find answers anywhere online. I programed my intervalometer Photoolex T720 to take 3 second images on a Canon T6i camera. The image info on the camera shows 2"9 and when loading them in DSS, they are shown as 2 sec images. If I shoot images at 4 seconds, the image info is 3"9 and the DSS import shows 3 seconds???? Does this have any implications on the image quality? Am I just too "detail crazy"?
I have seen that before. Intervalometers are rather crude devices, and if you let them handle the timing rather than the DSLR they don't seem to get it quite right. As long as they are consistently wrong so that the light frames and dark frames match it should be fine. Assuming also that the discrepancy isn't causing your stars to trail!
@@NebulaPhotos Thanks Nico for the quick response. All of the times show the same for the different frames. So that is not a problem and no star trails neither. I am more questioning if it would have an impact on the DSS algorithm if any. 100 x 2"9 image (effective shutter length) compared with the 100 x 2 sec DSS shows after upload for each image. The effective time after stacking would be 4.83min against 3.33min. Again I am probably just overthinking this as all is new to me and I worked in a field of little to no tolerances :) Thanks again and looking forward to more of your postings.
@@georgalbrecht8029 Ah, I see. That's interesting. It is a hobby that rewards attention to detail, and the discrepancy you noted could indeed result in large differences in total integration time that DSS reports over hundreds of subexposures. I am 99% positive that the discrepancy would have no negative impact on the algorithms that DSS uses to line up the images, calibrate them, and stack (average) them. It seems that what you found is that the bulb timer in the intervalometer is consistently 0.1" off, and that DSS consistently rounds down to the nearest second when reporting those statistics. If you are currently using BULB mode on the T6i, it might be worth trying manual mode (M) with the shutter speed set to 3" on the T6i, and then using the intervalometer to simply trigger the shutter rather than also timing the exposure. It might take some experimentation to figure out how to do that, but should be possible.
@@nicocarver2473 Thanks Nico. I will try your suggestion and another is that I can manually overwrite in DSS the shutter time of the lights (one by one). I will out of curiosity do this with a pack of 10 or 20 images and stack just to see if there is any difference visible between standard import and time corrected file. I will report back once I have played around with this a bit more. I am sure you don't mind knowing if there is any difference there. Thanks again
I just did a 30 x 30sec of the Andromeda to test out at iso 800 which worked out to 15 min total exposure! ( with Celestron NexStar Evolution 9.25") Using my trusty Nikon D610, did darks, flats and bias. When I got to the stretch step my histogram is not as tall and is more flat. After the initial stretch I can't move the left slider because it will cut into the data, is that ok or not? Also thanks for taking the time to show people step by step how to use GIMP and DSS!
@@NebulaPhotos ok, thanks. I should really get 300 or so photos to stack so I have something to work with. I haven't seen the stars in like a month here in Calgary, clear skies! Thanks for everything you do.
@@NebulaPhotos Another question about the f6.3 Focal reducer/ Field flattener. I just shot 30 30 second exposures with it at an iso 800 and my NexStar Evolution 9.25 but when I got to stretching the image i got vignetting which is fine but the center of the image is "blown out", too bright, is it too much iso or something else? When I shot some test shots the galaxy looked good and fairly dim but as soon as I started "first stretch" the screen went really white. Any tips on the focal reducer use with 9.25" telescope and a full frame camera?
@@KaHaDa_life Hard to say what you mean without seeing it. Make a duplicate layer (ctrl-j) then after you see it 'blown out' crop in to just the central part getting rid of the vignetting. Now delete the 'blown out' layer and try stretching again with the original. Maybe the extreme vignetting was throwing you off in the first stretch. As long as it's not blown out before stretching there should be some way to control the stretch to avoid everything just going white.
@@NebulaPhotos Ok, thank you, must re-watch one of your videos again to see how do you use gimp properly. It's not blown out before stretching that's for sure. I tried to leave my email in the comment before but the moderator algorithm erased it. Thank you for your response, I wish I could drop a link to Google drive so maybe you can take a look at the file but most likely you don't have time for that and the link will get erased in these comments anyways.
There is a PixInsight option now, but the command line interface still exists for Mac. You can download it here: www.starnetastro.com/download/ On newer MacOS, some people have run into permission issues. Running these chmod commands (cd do the directory where you downloaded starnet and then copy-paste one line at a time and press enter each time) seems to fix those issues: chmod +x ./rgb_starnet++ chmod +x ./run_rgb_starnet.sh chmod +x ./mono_starnet++ chmod +x ./run_mono_starnet.sh
@@NebulaPhotos Ok, thank you. Here the noise is brighter than the galaxy so I can't go on. And of course Starnet dont run at all. But I dont give up. You are a boss.
Wish I could speak other languages! Just out of curiousity: if you try the auto-translate feature on the closed captions, does it make any sense in French?
Check out some of my other videos for work with a $99 lens (Canon Nifty Fifty). I also see great photos of Andromeda taken with kit lenses on instagram using this technique every day. Please try and you will see! Clear skies, Nico
What format do you recommend? I've been using 4:3 because it's been common throughout my life, but 16:9 looks a lot better for landscapes, but I'm not sure about "skyscapes". I really appreciate the time you put into these Nico. Take care & stay safe! ✌
For me personally this is the most valuable youtube video ive seen. Ive been trying to figure out processing on gimp for over a year. People only ever show mainstream programs. Please do more vids with gimp. Ive a backlog of images that i can now attempt to process properly. Thankyou Thankyou Thankyou. Great content on your channel 👏
Hi Mark,
I do have some other DSS & GIMP and Siril & GIMP on the channel. Plan to do more in the future too. Cheers, Nico
I know it's been 2 years since this video but I am SO thankful I found this. I now have a DSLR, I have a tripod I can use, and although I can't go to a dark sky site, I am excited to try doing this either way. Thank you so much for this!
This is excellent. A proper old-school tutorial. It's so nice to have a video that explains things rather than cutting everything down to 7 minutes of flashy shortcuts and bad jokes to avoid scaring off casual RUclips viewers with zero interest in the subject.
I can't claim any great knowledge of the mysteries of astrophotography, but there's one thing I do know: the 'g' in GIMP - GNU [wildebeest] - comes from Xhosa and has a silent 'g', so it ought to be pronounced 'noo', rather than 'gernoo'.
Think of the 'g' in gnu like the 'k' in knee, knot and knuckle. Millions may disagree, but millions may also be wrong... 🤭
I really love your channel!!
Thanks!
Very nice tutorial. If everyone explained things as clearly as you, there’d be no confusion in the world. 🤓Can’t wait for your Siril video. Thanks
Wow, you really know how to work those layers! My worst subject, 😁 that and masks, when to use them and where to put them. Id need a 4-year degree to get that mastered the way you already have. I will save this and use the heck out of it, over and over. Thanks, Nico! Beautiful work, thanks for helping us rookies out. Also, thank you for the notification!!! 😁 I think you feel me. 👍
I learned more in this video than any other I have seen on this topic. Thank you so much.
Amazing!! Thanks a lot for making this hobby a lot more affordable and available to all!
Glad to be of help! Clear skies, Nico
@@NebulaPhotos clear skies don’t exist
Impressive. Thanks to you i was able to finaly pimp my M31 stacked photo after few attempts. Great work.
Yeah this is just an amazing guide, no time wasted, simple and understandable. Tysm!
Fantastic video, thank you for showing how to do everything with free software. Cheers!
Just processed my Orion Nebula images using this. Very pleased. Thank you.
This series of tutorials of photographing tracked and untracked DSOs along with processing them using a variety of software is outstanding and utterly useful. Great presentation, thoroughly explained and you even provide files for us to play around with ourselves while waiting for our own clear skies. Very inspiring.
Thank you! Trying my first stack and this is very helpful :)
You're awesome Nico. No one else goes into so much detail to help the newbie out. Thanks a lot.
Thanks so much for this video. I have been wanting to try this ever since I saw a post about in earlier this year. Took the opportunity of some dark skies last week and photographed Andromeda following your directions. Couldn't get starnet++ to produce anything other than completely black image so used dust and scratches filter in Affinity. Worked really well. All very clearly explained thank-you.
This video was really helpful. Using masks in GIMP has always been a mystery to me and now I at least, sort of, understand it. Thank you so much for posting this.
Thanks for a great tutorial. Only just started to try and perform processing on my images.
I'm going to have to watch that a few times though for it to sink in...👍
Thank you for posting this!! My wife and I have taken an interest in astrophotography, and this has been very helpful.
Loving your Tutorials! Awesome Work.
Thanks!
Clear skies!
Yay! I can't wait to try out your method as soon as i come back from work!
I just tested it out (instead of going to bed because it's always when you SHOULD go to bed that you become suddenly motivated and efficient). It greatly enhanced my final shot, thank you very much! Now that I have a 55-250, I can't wait to go shoot some more of M31 with a greater resolution than my 50mm. Your video will stay at arms lenght for a long time! Thank you again!
Sweet! I literally just got a new machine setup a few days ago and now I can start using this tutorial and also give it a go! Looking forward to trying a second attempt at M31! Clear Skies!
Best of luck and clear skies Jason!
Thank You Thank You. I have spent months trying to process my images with Gimp and i have learned more in this one video than in all that time. Now i am going to put this new learning to my past data and to check out your Siril videos, been using it for years and now with the new scripts its even better.
Glad I could help! Clear skies, Nico
Thank you very much for this extraordinary tutorial. Tell you my son lives in Boston, in Brookline. He works as a Molecular Biologist at Harvard. I live in Spain. A greeting.
Nice to hear from you Pedro!
Awesome. Thank you again with all your tutorials. Hope to see more and more tutorials and tips.
Thank you so much for this! As a beginner in deep sky this really is an invaluable step by step process for images very accessible to me and my equipment. Cannot thank you enough for this!!!
Nico, this has been a super useful video. I love the detail of explanation that will allow me to go and try this myself as a complete novice. Thank you.
I agree with Mark Chapman!! Most useful video yet, I wasn't sure how to save a TIFF file so I could post to social media, well now I know how to make it pop and post it LOL Thanks Nico you are the best
Excellent tutorial Thanks.
Great tutorial Nico! I learn something new from each video you put out. Keep up the great work!
I really appreciate the sample file you included for practice! I followed along step by step and am amazed at the result on my first try.
Hopefully I'll be able to get out and get my own pictures soon.
Great content! Thank you so much!
Thanks David, glad you like it! Clear skies, Nico
It is pure MAGIC! It is the best tutorial!!!! THX
Great video, great content, mate! Subbed.
Thanks Jano! Clear skies, Nico
Thank you so much my friend! First time even attempting Andromeda and boy do I need to figure out how to use my Bahtinov mask! Lol. Wonderful videos and I'll definitely be checking this out again when I retry Andromeda (as soon as the moon goes away in a week or two).
Clear skies and thanks again!
That is a brutally good result considering no tracking, holy damn. I use tracking and I've not gotten results nearly as good as this, mine are a bit less noisy due to longer exposure times but you've got so much detail! Holy, gonna follow this next time I photograph andromeda and maybe I'll pick up a few new things in terms of post processing.
Thanks! Starnet++ is really cool for bringing out detail for any deep sky shot while controlling star size. Clear skies, Nico
thank you for the generous help you give to us beginners.
I love your videos! the best astrophotography tutorials in the web. Could be possible to do a tutorial for the Milky Way, please. Thanks for the for sharing your knowledge.
Hi David, I had planned to do a milky way video this summer, but I didn't get to it, so it probably won't happen till next summer. I did do Milky Way at 50mm: ruclips.net/video/zRp3Qu_0K6o/видео.html , but didn't go in to including landscape. I'd say the key to Milky Way is an interesting, dark location.
Clear skies, Nico
Sir lots of love from india.
Plz make more more astronomy tutorials.
Plz make them on dslr+star tracker+ DSS+ gimp
Many of us only use this object and softwares.
Plz sir make more and more capturing and editing videos on this things.
Want to see more nebula and clusters of Messier series.
Yes, ok!
Wow! What a great series of videos. I have just been playing around so far with astrophotography, and done some stacking, and post processing. I've had results which I am happy with, but could easily be seen as being, "amateur."
Your shot looks amazing, by comparison, and the previous video and this one have shown me how to take my hobby to the next level, from stuff I look at, and am happy with, and friends and family kind of pat me on the back over, to stuff which would probably wow a good chunk of people who don't know a lot about astrophotography.
That said, if anyone says, "how do you do that," or, "it must cost a fortune to get something like that," well...I just point them to your video, and they too could start having, "wow," photos.
There are a lot of good astro people on YT, and you have just shot up into those ranks, in my book, with this tutorial series! I'm sad I haven't really watched your videos before now. My loss. Thanks!
This is a very informative video....would you please consider doing a couple for more separate tutorials in Gimp for diffuse nebula like the Pelican and also Star Clusters in RGB. Also how to get good coloured stars and protection with masking in these situations.....thank you.❤️😊
I don't have my own camera or setup (yet), but I did find a website that offered the raw file data so you could practice. Downloaded the files for M42 and M31, and along with this tutorial and a few others on your channel, I was able to post-process some amazing looking photos. You made it simple and easy to work along with. Here's to hoping I have just as much luck when I start snapping my own frames!
Nice! I have all my raw file data on my website too. For this video it's at: nebulaphotos.com/resources/m31
@@NebulaPhotos Bless people like you! Is it okay if I share my results using your data with credits?
Yep! All of my videos, data and photos are released with creative commons license meaning free to use and share as long as you credit.
What’s the website?
In all tutorials on DSS I see people load files using the UI, and then they show you need to check them. If you drag your images from explorer onto the DeepSkyStacker window, DSS will ask you what kind of files they are (light,dark,bias,etc) AND it will automatically check them in the list.
I never use the UI to load files ;)
Thanks for the tip Martin!
NP the best channel
Thanks for the detailed video! Why do you seperate the edits into different layers?
Thanks a lot!
Thanks bro!!!
Hey, I am Jashandeep Singh. Thanks for uploading, helped a lot :)
Glad it helped. Clear skies, Nico
Hey Nico, thanks for your effort in teaching these techniques! I have found it a great help. I wondered if you have a tutorial for using Affinity photo for processing, this is what I use and can’t quite get satisfying results. Thanks👍🏼
I don't. I have a list of software I have been meaning to try and affinity photo is on that list
Can u please make a content with the maximum equipment u have? Btw great content,keep it up🤘🤘
Check out this older video I made. Is this what you are looking for?: ruclips.net/video/ksFO3d6XvH0/видео.html
@@NebulaPhotos Thank you
27:37 spittin' lines and rimes, commitn' tough crimes and shooting magnums like rick grimes
You're the best 👌
Thanks again for the amazing tutorial! I just need to figure out where Andromeda is. Can't pin point it from where I live, maybe it's the light pollution.
Yeah, it can be difficult with light pollution, you might need a green laser or other kind of finder to help.
Look for Cassiopia and then move four "W" heights down from the right hand "V" Use live view to find the smudge.
@@NebulaPhotos Green laser? Hmm...lemme look into that. Thank you again for the awesome videos, these have rekindled my love for night sky photography. I loved when I captured Orion Nebula on my first try!
@@nickdsnik1675 I tried so many time like this, I could only see so many stars, but no smudge. It is either really small for my camera or really faint seen from my city. I hope I get to go to some low light polluted place with clearer skies. Thanks BTW.
@@BrajendraVikramSingh I talk a bit about using a green laser and other finder devices here: ruclips.net/video/AKKlzbgQStE/видео.html
Hi Nico!
I am Francisco Gonçalves, from Madeira Islands - Portugal!
Congratulations for the videos! They are really amazing!
I saw this one and the others about Lagoon nebula and the edition in PixInsight. You are a really good comunicator and very compreensive on the explanations!
Tomorrow will be my first attempt to get a photo from Andromeda. I have a old russian lens: Rubinar 1000mm, f/10, do you think is a good focal distance to use? I have a Nikon D810. If not a have a 70-200 f/2.8.
Thanks in advance!
Hi Francisco,
Thanks! Unfortunately I think 1000mm f/10 is too long/slow for this method. If you have a different lens that would be better. Under f/4 and under 300mm is best.
Clear skies, Nico
PS/ your 1000mm lens would be good to try on Jupiter, Saturn, and the Moon
@@NebulaPhotos thanks a lot! Will use my 70-200 f/2.8 with my D810 in crop mode.
Thanks a lot Nico!
Excellent video. I am doing what you told in the video. I am shooting with 50mm lens with a crop canon camera. What should be the star threshold ? I have made 116 stars. But I finally crop the image very less no of stars there. Any suggestions? Thank you
It might be stacking on noise, esp. if you were a bit out of focus. If you open one light frame in GIMP, perhaps you can estimate the number of stars in the image, and then use that to fine tune the threshold in DSS. Clear skies, Nico
So useful ty
Great tutorial! Love them please keep it up!! One question, I seem to be getting a lot of gradients in my final stacks(reddish green tint) is that something to fix in settings? I usually stack in super pixel mode with a median filter checked to reduce noise, those were the only differences I noticed from my settings to yours
Hi Joe, if it's a gradient it is most likely light pollution and is truly part of the picture so can't be eliminated with stacking settings. Check out my Orion No Trackers videos for a light pollution gradient removal method in Photoshop or GIMP.
Take a stacked image and send it to your iPad, it’s pretty impressive what you can do with the image, don’t laugh, try it.
Last Friday I got over 3000 frames of Andromeda at 300mm, and have been trying to stack them, but technology hates me. My first stack DSS crashed, my second Sequator output a corrupted file, my third DSS didn't actually output any files for some reason, and I've had to cancel another this morning because Windows refused to connect to wifi without a reboot and I needed to work on an essay which I had saved on Google Docs. Fingers crossed that I can finally get that damn image stacked and processed, so I can move onto the frames I got of the Pleiades on the same night. It was the one clear night in a huge swath of nights which were plagued by wildfire smoke, so I'm looking forward to the results.
You might want to try stacking fewer. You might be running in to memory / disk issues stacking so many. Try 1500 for example
@@NebulaPhotos Makes sense, especially since I'm stuck with my laptop for now, which has less storage space and is not as powerful as my desktop. If the stack I currently have running fails again, I'll try to stack fewer images or stack in a few batches which I could then combine.
This is the first time I've tried this many files in DSS, I used mostly Sequator in the past which is great if you want something fast and easy but doesn't have as many advanced options.
I'm following this tutorial step by step, thank you for such a great explanation. My only problem is, once you start to stretch the image, and later the separate colors, my image histogram is almost flat to the left. i can't distinguish the separate color channels. Did I do something wrong? I have a modded DSLR with the low pass filter removed.
Just keep moving the middle slider over to the left (multiple stretches) until the histogram spreads out and separates from the left edge.
@@NebulaPhotos quick response for a video that’s 2 years old! Awesome. And thanks, I’ll try!
I need something to help focus because making it starless just won’t work. They’re too fuzzy. It takes out most of them but there’s a few small guys left.
Starnet got updated and no longer supports the GIMP tif file format... Or is it just me ?
Tnx my frend. Witch one program you made better results or is the same?
I had a problem with gimp ... whenever I curve and stretch the image ... it becomes green and a big green circle and lots of vignette appears . What do I do ?
Sounds like vignetting. How did you take flats?
I took with white handkerchief over lens in daytime . I have A LOT OF VIGNETTING IN ALL MY IMAGES , even with flats of the same settings of light frames
@@drrach1 flats should NOT be same settings as lights, you likely have very overexposed flats in that case that would not correct vignetting and cause more problems than not using them. Try stacking without them to see. Flats should be taken at same ISO as lights, but shutter speed will be much shorter and is adjusted so that the histogram (or exposure meter) is in the middle. Clear skies, Nico
Very nice tutorial. However Starnet++ doen't work on my machine. CPU not compatible.
Is there a workaround or an alternative?
dear friend i wish i could get these steps in turkish from somewhere written
Great tutorial - but when I try to run StarNet++ I get a 'permission denied' error... Any idea how to fix this please?
Hi Cliff, If you are on a Mac and not on an administrator account, try running it with the word 'sudo' in front of the command, and see if it asks you for your computer's password. If so, type it in, and press enter.
@@NebulaPhotos Thanks! I am admin but gave up and did that part on a PC instead :)
Is there going to be a 2d with Photoshop? :D
I can follow along fine in PS until we get to the layer masks, and then it all falls to pieces. The programs are different enough for me to get confused :S
Anyway, love your series. Subscribed!
Photoshop is covered in part 1: ruclips.net/video/pXcRKoxTPVg/видео.html
Bro how did it go from not visible to a stunning pic
how are your images less noisy?????
I followed your instructions and downloaded the M31 data but my core is bright and a little large. Any idea what steps are needed to make to correct the image. I enjoyed this and hope you have more images for us beginners to try.
I have a technique for repairing a blown out core where you save a version of the image with a lesser stretch and then blend in the core details from the lesser stretched version with the more aggressively stretched version using layer masks. Not sure if that comes across in text. I show the technique a bit in my first Orion video series.
Can You make a tutorial about...moon? Please...
ruclips.net/video/4QV4Gv8VXBk/видео.html
Sir i have a problem in opening my images in DSS
I captured M31 using my telescope and mobile phone camera
The jpeg images are opening on dss
It is showing "can not open multiple files from this folder"
Please help sir🙏
Have you moved the jpegs from your phone to a folder on your computer? If not move to a folder on the desktop, and open from there
@@NebulaPhotos yeah it worked😃
Thanks a lot sir😇
I used my 55-200mm f/4-5.6 on Nikon D3300 @ 200mm f/5.6 and captured 850x1" lights and 60 each of darks, bias and flats. Stacked in DSS and it detected only 41 stars for stacking. Anyway, as I selected to stack best 80% of images, it did stack 668 images. Final result turned out to be uh... a bit underwhelming. I processed my image in GIMP. Just to get more details out, I had to stretch even further than what Nico showed in this video. In the end it was extremely noisy. I had to stop there as I couldn't use Starnet++ on my windows laptop because it gave me error because it couldn't find some .dll files. So my question is, if I am limited by my lens for this? Or can I still get something better out of my lens. I also have a 50mm f/1.8 prime lens. I can use it, but it will produce a wide field image and M31 would be a tiny part of the image.
Yes, keep experimenting. With a f/1.8 lens you will be letting in something like 5x more light with each shot which will really help with noise. Yes, M31 will be small in the field, but still clearly visible and it can be cool to see it in context with M33
I feel your pain. I have the same lens and ran into your same issue at 200mm. I've been experimenting with dialing back the zoom. 85mm landed me at f/4.5, which is miles better than f/5.6. I am currently try to process ~400 2 second lights at 100mm, which is also f/4.5. I've been waiting for what seems like forever for this video to be posted (THANK YOU, NICO!!!). I can get a decent image in GIMP on the first pass, but I am struggling with StarNet++, as well. I'm getting no where even close to what Nico has posted. Early days, though. We'll get there. I'll try Nico's idea to drop down to some faster glass, but a shorter focal length (50mm for me). That will be interesting. I'm not even sure if I'll find Andromeda in the Live View at 50mm! HAHAHAHAAHHA
@@NebulaPhotos Thanks Nico. Your tutorials are the best of what I have come across on RUclips. I'll give it another try with my 50mm f/1.8
Clear skies!
@@HighNoonan So with smaller focal lengths and wider aperture of f/4.5 is able to capture better images. I will give that a go. Is there a chance we could see your final picture?
Are you able to get the starless image processed in Starnet++? I'm unable to even load my image in the application.
Anyway, I'm just getting started. Hopefully it will only get better.
Clear skies!
@@mformandar I'll post a link here later today (at work now) to the various images.
I greatly appreciate all your tutorials. I vividly follow all your videos as they always cover some of the questions I have. I personally just started with astrophotography and there are some problems I can not find answers anywhere online. I programed my intervalometer Photoolex T720 to take 3 second images on a Canon T6i camera. The image info on the camera shows 2"9 and when loading them in DSS, they are shown as 2 sec images. If I shoot images at 4 seconds, the image info is 3"9 and the DSS import shows 3 seconds???? Does this have any implications on the image quality? Am I just too "detail crazy"?
I have seen that before. Intervalometers are rather crude devices, and if you let them handle the timing rather than the DSLR they don't seem to get it quite right. As long as they are consistently wrong so that the light frames and dark frames match it should be fine. Assuming also that the discrepancy isn't causing your stars to trail!
@@NebulaPhotos Thanks Nico for the quick response. All of the times show the same for the different frames. So that is not a problem and no star trails neither. I am more questioning if it would have an impact on the DSS algorithm if any. 100 x 2"9 image (effective shutter length) compared with the 100 x 2 sec DSS shows after upload for each image. The effective time after stacking would be 4.83min against 3.33min. Again I am probably just overthinking this as all is new to me and I worked in a field of little to no tolerances :) Thanks again and looking forward to more of your postings.
@@georgalbrecht8029 Ah, I see. That's interesting. It is a hobby that rewards attention to detail, and the discrepancy you noted could indeed result in large differences in total integration time that DSS reports over hundreds of subexposures. I am 99% positive that the discrepancy would have no negative impact on the algorithms that DSS uses to line up the images, calibrate them, and stack (average) them. It seems that what you found is that the bulb timer in the intervalometer is consistently 0.1" off, and that DSS consistently rounds down to the nearest second when reporting those statistics. If you are currently using BULB mode on the T6i, it might be worth trying manual mode (M) with the shutter speed set to 3" on the T6i, and then using the intervalometer to simply trigger the shutter rather than also timing the exposure. It might take some experimentation to figure out how to do that, but should be possible.
@@nicocarver2473 Thanks Nico. I will try your suggestion and another is that I can manually overwrite in DSS the shutter time of the lights (one by one). I will out of curiosity do this with a pack of 10 or 20 images and stack just to see if there is any difference visible between standard import and time corrected file. I will report back once I have played around with this a bit more. I am sure you don't mind knowing if there is any difference there. Thanks again
I just did a 30 x 30sec of the Andromeda to test out at iso 800 which worked out to 15 min total exposure! ( with Celestron NexStar Evolution 9.25") Using my trusty Nikon D610, did darks, flats and bias. When I got to the stretch step my histogram is not as tall and is more flat. After the initial stretch I can't move the left slider because it will cut into the data, is that ok or not? Also thanks for taking the time to show people step by step how to use GIMP and DSS!
Just move the middle slider until you have seperation. Only after you see seperation should you use the left slider
@@NebulaPhotos ok, thanks. I should really get 300 or so photos to stack so I have something to work with. I haven't seen the stars in like a month here in Calgary, clear skies! Thanks for everything you do.
@@NebulaPhotos Another question about the f6.3 Focal reducer/ Field flattener. I just shot 30 30 second exposures with it at an iso 800 and my NexStar Evolution 9.25 but when I got to stretching the image i got vignetting which is fine but the center of the image is "blown out", too bright, is it too much iso or something else? When I shot some test shots the galaxy looked good and fairly dim but as soon as I started "first stretch" the screen went really white. Any tips on the focal reducer use with 9.25" telescope and a full frame camera?
@@KaHaDa_life Hard to say what you mean without seeing it. Make a duplicate layer (ctrl-j) then after you see it 'blown out' crop in to just the central part getting rid of the vignetting. Now delete the 'blown out' layer and try stretching again with the original. Maybe the extreme vignetting was throwing you off in the first stretch. As long as it's not blown out before stretching there should be some way to control the stretch to avoid everything just going white.
@@NebulaPhotos Ok, thank you, must re-watch one of your videos again to see how do you use gimp properly. It's not blown out before stretching that's for sure. I tried to leave my email in the comment before but the moderator algorithm erased it. Thank you for your response, I wish I could drop a link to Google drive so maybe you can take a look at the file but most likely you don't have time for that and the link will get erased in these comments anyways.
I can’t seem to download the same starnet++ on my Mac. Has it changed to pixinsight?
There is a PixInsight option now, but the command line interface still exists for Mac. You can download it here: www.starnetastro.com/download/ On newer MacOS, some people have run into permission issues. Running these chmod commands (cd do the directory where you downloaded starnet and then copy-paste one line at a time and press enter each time) seems to fix those issues:
chmod +x ./rgb_starnet++
chmod +x ./run_rgb_starnet.sh
chmod +x ./mono_starnet++
chmod +x ./run_mono_starnet.sh
@@NebulaPhotos thanks for this! I think I was just downloading the pixinsight plugin instead of the command line tool. Hopefully it works now
Where can I get Starnet++... Seems to have ben removed form Sourceforge
www.starnetastro.com/download/
@@NebulaPhotos Thanks!! I am going out as soon as the sky clears... Following your method and hoping for some awesome images!
What means when the isto became full of lines? I'm 30 seconds into the process lol
By Isto do you mean histogram? If so, don't worry about it, that's normal
@@NebulaPhotos Ok, thank you. Here the noise is brighter than the galaxy so I can't go on. And of course Starnet dont run at all. But I dont give up. You are a boss.
@@valentinotera3244 Ah, darn. Heavy light pollution?
@@NebulaPhotos Nah, has to do with my utter ineptness about anything related to AC voltage and batteries.
First!
Too bad for French speakers, because your videos seem interesting but difficult to follow in English!
Wish I could speak other languages! Just out of curiousity: if you try the auto-translate feature on the closed captions, does it make any sense in French?
All this with a 700$ lenses... meh :/ not really affordable for everyone. Thus, this picture is not for beginners or with "just the gear we have"...
Check out some of my other videos for work with a $99 lens (Canon Nifty Fifty). I also see great photos of Andromeda taken with kit lenses on instagram using this technique every day. Please try and you will see! Clear skies, Nico
What format do you recommend? I've been using 4:3 because it's been common throughout my life, but 16:9 looks a lot better for landscapes, but I'm not sure about "skyscapes". I really appreciate the time you put into these Nico. Take care & stay safe! ✌
It really depends on the skyscape in question, but I agree 16:9 so you can fill a monitor or TV looks great!
@@NebulaPhotos Thank you Nico.
First!