Photoshop Actions

I spent a little (emphasis on little) of my holiday money on the purchase of two Photoshop action packages for astrophotography. My simple goal for today was using the packages to reprocess one of my old images. Here's my original take on NGC 6781, a small planetary in Aquila. This was shot in June 2012 using H alpha and OIII narrowband filters with my ST8300M CCD and C925. This was my original "final" image:

Original Processing

I used the OIII data for both the blue and green channels, which produced a washed-out cyan in the nebula's interior. Other defects in this image include some uncorrected mild vignetting, a noisy background and almost colorless stars. Using the actions it was an easy task to generate a synthetic green channel, clean up the background, give the stars some color and pretty much obliterate the vignetting (without any flats). Wow! That's not bad for a day's work with new software. Here's the result:

Processed using actions

Not that it's perfect by any means. I think the background is too black and I've lost a lot of the dimmer stars. I'll take it as good enough for the first day of using the actions.

The two packages are Astronomy Tools ($21) and Annie's Astro Actions ($15).  There's some overlap between the packages, but they're so inexpensive that you can get both!

Another telescope, WOW, images

Yes, I've purchased another telescope, this time a used C9.25. This is something I've wanted for a long time; it fills the niches for long focal length deep sky imaging and planetary imaging/observing. I've been using it so far only for deep sky imaging, and it's very nice, even at f/10. Here are some samples:

Messier 16 (Eagle Nebula) LRGB

M27 (first light image) Ha+OIII full frame

NGC 6820 (full frame) Ha
Sort of looks like M 16, doesn't it?

NGC 6781 (full frame) Ha + OIII

At f/10 it has a nice flat field. These are imaged with an SBIG ST-8300M and Baader filters. I usually bin 3x3.

WOW stands for the Wisconsin Observers Weekend, an annual event that brings together amateurs from all over Wisconsin and nearby states. It's held at the lovely Hartman Creek state park near Waupaca, WI, and features very dark skies. If you're in the MN, IA, WI, IL area and looking for a nice group of people to observe with under great skies, you can't do much better. I had bad luck with a faulty dew preventer, but still managed one night of imaging that got me the M 16 image above.

Next for me is the backyard observatory, the resumption of the school year, and a weekend trip to Jeffers Petroglyphs. More images coming soon, too.