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 the more interesting for me to try and get a nice image out of this. Most eye catching are the RCW objects, which are different types of objects. Let’s have a more detailed l ..read more

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. To me, this happens a lot whenever there ‘happens to be’ a planetary nebula in the FOV. They are not the main target and I might discover them only when working on the images ..read more

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 pixels which contains a lot of very interesting objects and detailed features. Click to view the full resolution version of the image NGC6604 and Sh2-54 NGC 6604 is an open star cluster in the constellation Serpens. The associa ..read more

PixInsight has many keyboard short cuts build in right from the start (you can find an overview of them here.), some very useful while others won’t get used at all probably. One thing that bothered me though is that I can’t start processes using keyboard short cuts so I decided to look for a way around this. Luckily there is this great open source program called AutoHotkey that will let you define your own keyboard shortcuts and basically have them do anything you like. Even better; you can also program mouse buttons and movements! Using AutoHotkey You can download AutoHotkey for free here. As ..read more

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 store these values somewhere in PixInsight? Well, you can! Saving process icons To store a process along with its settings you can simply drag the triangle icon out to the workspace and it will s ..read more

Which is better: many short exposures or fewer long exposures? 120 x 1 minute exposures or 10 x 12 minute exposures? Questions similar to this one get asked really often and they probably receive all kinds of different answers. People talk about the camera, faintness of the signal, dithering, stacking, light pollution etc. etc. So many factors creep into the discussion that sooner or later it will seem like a personal choice, almost like a matter of opinion. Is this really a matter of opinion and/or complicated? Or can we find some definitive answer to the question if more shorter exposures ar ..read more

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 preview and apply the process with different settings so we can really compare the results of our fine tuning in great detail. In this post I want to give you some quick tips for working with previews in ..read more

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 real reason we are talking about Pixar here is color and color theory. One of the things Pixar needs to be great at is the use of color in their movies ..read more

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 up the Preferences window. In this window go to ‘Directories and Network’. You’ll see a window similar to the one shown below: On the right hand side of the window you see ..read more

One of the things that can make your life as astrophotographer a bit easier is to have an external power source for your DSLR instead of using the in camera batteries. Turns out that it doesn’t make any difference on dark current, but it’s the increased capacity that matters. Most of us will want to ‘leave and forget’ their setup running for a certain amount of time once we are setup and everything is running smoothly. But with the potential of your camera’s battery running out this is sometimes tricky (checking battery) or will cause loss of exposure time because the battery ran out. Another ..read more