Archive for Stellarium

Lyra & Hercules constellations

Posted in Astrophotography with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on 2009/07/23 by computerphysicslab

Last night Lyra and Hercules were located near the zenith of my suburban sky, so I could make a series of 90 shots with 10 seconds of exposure each one. My equipment was the DSLR camera Canon EOS 450 (Rebel XTi). This image sequence is equivalent to a 15 minutes long single shot. After adding them with the shift-and-add technique, and substracting a dark frame (via Photoshop) that includes light pollution I got a final picture. I have aligned (using Nebulosity 2 software) the Stellarium map of the area and created an animated gif that switchs from the photo to the map continuously. It seems every star is located correctly where it should be 馃槈

Globular clusters M13 and M92 are there in the photo like 2 stars.

Lyra-Hercules-photo-map-small

Lyra-Hercules-photo-map

Astrophotography Software

Posted in Astrophotography with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 2009/03/20 by computerphysicslab

It is important to apply the best astronomical software to enhance your pictures. Otherwise noise, blur, light pollution, hot and cold pixels and low exposures can degrade our work. Here is a list of my favorite astrophotography software:

* Image Stacking: Registax, PhotoAcute Studio, Nebulosity and DeepSkyStacker.

* Retouching: Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop.

* Zooming: onOne Genuine Fractals.

* Sharpening: Maximum entropy deconvolution with AstroArt, and wavelets with Registax.

* Noise removal: Neat Image.

* Video edition: VirtualDub, Adobe Premiere and EasyBMPtoAVI.

* Night sky renderers: Stellarium, StarryNight, Google Earth & WikiSky.