A word about my Astrophotography processing:

 

The photos reproduced here are a showcase of the final processed and published photos taken between August 2020 and November 2024, the vast majority from my ex-home balcony in Alcochete (2020-2023) and as from 1st May 2023, from my countryside backyard somewhere in the North of the Country, and some from a few other locations while on vacations - Vidigueira (Alentejo), Ponte-de-Tourim (Minho), Castelo Mendo (Beira Alta) and Várzea de Meruge (Beira Alta).

 

The Galaxy, Nebula and Cluster photos showed here are result of the stacking many individual photos (between 10-100, sometimes more), using different exposure times of 60s, 120s, 180s, 300s or 600s each, depending on the subject and the visibility conditions, and then adding to this stack a big number of calibration frames (Darks, Flats, Bias) in order to cut out imperfections and color aberrations caused by the telescope lens, Luminous pollution caused by the street lights/cities nearby illumination, and noise, which is mainly created by the Earth's atmosphere and by the capturing camera itself (these are the most relevant items to be "corrected" by the calibration frames).

The stacking was done with DSS-Deep Sky Stacker now version 5.1.6, and sometimes using ZWO's ASI Studio Stacker, actually version 1.13.

The photo processing was initially done with Adobe Photoshop, but recently replaced by Affinity Photo 2, to give the final touches, although my aim is always to maintain the natural colors of the photographed objects as close as possible to their original.

 

The Moon and the Planets Saturn and Jupiter were in fact filmed, and then the thousands of individual frames captured on each video, initially processed with PIPP 2.5.9 - Planetary Imaging PreProcessor, then stacked by quality percentage using AutoStakkert! 3.0.14 (Sometimes I also use Registax6 to further enhance the final photo details), and lately with the ASI Studio Planet Stacker, actually version 1.13, and then (formerly, Adobe Photoshop), Affinity Photo 2 is used to give the final touches.

Although I also photographed Mars, Venus, Uranus and Neptune, none of my telescopes were powerful enough to capture these objects in a way that we could see details.

I'm planning to take proper photos of Mars and Venus (and better ones of Saturn and Jupiter) later in 2025, as soon as I manage to get a more powerful replacement  for the (sold in 2022) RC6 telescope, capable to capture more details.

 

 Each session represented many hours of planning, installing and uninstalling the equipment outside, adjusting and focusing, capturing the photos (sometimes, more than 200) and then stacking and editing them on the computer until reaching to the final result photo. 

Just to give an idea, the total amount of data captured until October, 14th 2024, after an extensive clearing of unneeded files,  was of 4,1 TB of Data (4 491 193 689 304 bytes), with the inherent backup challenges that this amount of data represents to be maintained and secured. For that I have an array of 2x 2TB SSD Disks for storing and and 2x 4 TB Fast HDDs for backup.

All the processing is done on a Lenovo Legion Y540 (gamer grade PC), Intel 6 Core i7-9750H CPU @ 2.60 GHz, 16GB RAM, 1 TB SSD, running Windows 11, version 23H2 (high performance Laptop machine, although having more than 5 years now).

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