Starting this topic as a place to explore further the amazing astrophotography capabilities of Smartscopes of any kind from light polluted skies or dark sites.
This is for Astronomical images lovers that want to step into more custom imaging processing, including but not necessarily re-stacking of subframes or processing with specialized softwares of all sorts, paying and non paying !
It is about sharing processed images, tips and asking technical questions to get the most out of those amazing devices.
Why not just going to Astrophotography CN threads ?
Smartscopes astrophotography is not the typical astrophotography for following reasons:
- Huge amount of subframes because of short exposures 10-30 secs, but not lucky imaging, and not standard >180sec. Therefore cannot be stacked easily in slow softwares (ex. Pixinsight)
- Live stack cannot go on multiple nights
- Very high background noise due to non cooled sensor, resulting in grainy and blotchy color noise, that even AI struggles to remove
- Exclusively color camera shots, even in narrowband
- Not always good sampling rates (especially the Seestar30 and S30Pro)
- Star elongations, sometimes severe (S30)
- Essentially Deep Sky, plus a bit of Solar and Moon
- It’s a standardized device, with less multiplicity and depth of topics
- On device processing is a black box, that does many things with no control on it (Gradient removal, Color Calibration, Background Neutralization, Stretching), or limited control (Sharpening, Denoising, Color, Contrast)
As a topic starter a couple Seestar out of the box images vs processed images:
Bortle 8-9 Leo’s Triplet with S30:
Seestar Stack
Reprocessed with drizzle x2 in Siril + PI
Bortle 8-9 M104 Sombrero Galaxy with S50with Drizzle x2 + PI:
Seestar Stack
Reprocessed with drizzle x2 in Siril + PI
I personally use Pixinsight only, started back in 2014, and do as a standard Seestar procedure (about 15-20 min total time including calculations, processes and standard parameters are all saved and re-used):
1- Gradient correction
2- Spectrometric Color Calibration with background neutralization
3- SCNR to remove greenish cast
4- Blur Xterminator (sharpen stars 60%, enhance halos 15%, sharpen non stellar 90%)
5- StarX to remove stars for later reintegration
6- Noise Xterminator on Starless (with big scale to remove color blotches)
7- Stretch Starless
8- Mask of Starless structures with Multiscale Median Transformation turning off scale 1, 2 and 1024 and R to remove completely the background
9- Apply mask to protect the galaxies, and curves transformation to saturation to decolorize the background to eliminate the color blotches, and also a bit to the luminance to darken it and hide the now colorless blotches
10- invert the mask to protect the background this time
11- With curves transformation Boost the general color saturation of the galaxies
12- Increase the contrast of the luminance with curves
13- Apply HDR Transform to compress dynamic range of galaxy bulges or high intensity areas, (level 4, with hue preservation and lightness mask)
14- Stretch stars first with Arcsinh Stretch and then normal histogram to get non bloated soft profile stars with more colors
15- Boost star colors with curves transformation
16- Reintegrate the stars
What is your processing routine and software ?
Edited by Stevan Klaas, 05 May 2025 - 03:20 PM.
