Light Pollution

Light pollution in suburban skies makes nearly impossible astrophotography. Nevertheless, there exists some computer techniques to make it possible. I have used a dark frame to catch the exact pattern of the light pollution in the photographed area. The way to accomplish this is not difficult. Shooting in continuous mode the DSLR camera facing the zenith in my home window, and forcing every frame to last 15 seconds I got a sequence of subframes to be processed afterward.

To get the dark frame I do some image arithmetic with Paint Shop Pro 9: I choose 3 or 4 distant subframes and compute them using “darkest” option. This way, stars become to fade until disappearing.

With Paint Shop Pro 9 and batch processor I apply a barrel lens distortion of 17 (empirical value to correct a 18mm focal lens like Canon’s) to every subframe and also to the dark frame.

Once got the dark frame DeepSkyStacker is needed to stack the single subframes and substract the dark frame. The sideral drift of the field is automatically compensated with the intelligent algorithm that DeepSkyStacker provides.

The resulting image is surprising taking into account this is an urban sky.