How To Process A Comet With Round Stars using Astropixel Processor, Starnet++ and Photoshop

[@hael8680]

Great video!! Thank you!! I had done everything BUT was missing the part about MAD rejection outlier. Unbelievable that the staff at AAP never bothered doing instructional material on this topic with amount of details. They owe you BIG TIMES!!

[@LuckyBudd]

I am glad it helped! Looking forward to seeing your image! APP is an awesome software, lots to learn for sure!

[@TheOriginalTommo]

Found this by accident and so glad I did. Sadly by luck and not by Google search. Have APP but had no idea about the MAD etc.. Off to process my 155 x 45s subs (@200mm) now 🤞🤞 Much nucleus clicking I expect .😣 Nicely explained and at a good pace. Thank you 😀

[@LuckyBudd]

Hahah! My pleasure my friend! Hopefully only a couple of nucleus clicks! Follow me on insta at luckys_astro so I can check your photo! Glad it helped!

[@pavlini0]

Great tutorial!

[@LuckyBudd]

Cheers! Hope it helps!

[@jackdirt667]

Absolutely Fantastic!! Worked like you instructed. Used APP to remove star trails - still had a bit of the trails showing - might try and polish it up and re-do. Please don't ever take this video down. You are obviously much more educated in these tools - we learn from the masters... Thanks!!

[@LuckyBudd]

Hahahaha! Thank you my friend! I really am not! I just played with it over and over and asked a bunch of questions until I found a way to make it work! Then I thought, "I bet others are struggling like me, I will post what I learned!" Def a few days of trial and error and frustration packed into this! You can try removing some star trails in lightroom with dehaze/contrast.... as well, playing around in photoshop... :)

[@ecovish]

This is super helpful man. Your rosette video actually inspired me to get a hyperstar and I’m loving the ease of astro on an alt-az mount. Thanks!

[@LuckyBudd]

Hey Vishal. That’s just amazing!! So glad to hear it :) Lots of great ways to enjoy this hobby! Please follow me on instagram so I can see your images!

[@GaryEasonFlightArtworks]

Really useful, thanks. Incidentally, instead of Layer / Layer Style / Blending options at 10'55"-ish you can just right click on the layer: it's the top option.

[@LuckyBudd]

Awesome to know! Lots of shortcuts to learn in Photoshop! Appreciate it!

[@cooky187]

Couldn’t have gotten my shot finished without you! Much appreciated 💪

[@LuckyBudd]

That’s awesome! Follow me on instagram so I can see it :) I struggled with this process for days, as soon as I had something that worked I wanted to make sure to share 👍

[@cooky187]

@@LuckyBudd thanks for the reply. I will do, I have only been doing this a couple of months don’t expect anything on your level. AP newbie and the universe throws a comet at me 😅

[@LuckyBudd]

@@cooky187 you know. It’s been about 2 years for me. This community is amazing, everyone is great at sharing what they have learned!

[@cooky187]

@@LuckyBudd it literally is the best community the fact I learned everything from KZbin just goes to show. 6 months ago I wouldn’t even know where to start. Thanks to amazing people like yourself I am learning super fast 🙏

[@LuckyBudd]

@@cooky187 same! The community is awesome!

[@mikelockwood2104]

well done - thank you for the link in the APP Forum

[@LuckyBudd]

My pleasure my friend! Glad I could help! It was tough to figure out so I figured I ought to share :)

[@gwtomsic]

TOP DRAWER! Excellent. Now to apply your great process to my beloved Astroart and GIMP:) Thank you.

[@LuckyBudd]

Awesome! Glad it helps :)

[@Astro.Q]

Hi, thanks for this video. I have a few sets of data but did not have a clue on how to process images. Hopefully, the software is available on a widows pc fantastic tutorial mate well done 😀

[@LuckyBudd]

Hey! Thanks! :) Yes, Astropixel Processor is available on a PC and they offer a free trial. Starnet ++ is also a freeware on a PC. I am not sure if photoshop/lightroom has free trials but are available on a PC :)

[@JulesStoop]

Thanks for sharing. It’s actually fairly similar to my own APP based process. You can save yourself the round trip to a Windows machine, by the way. I got the command line version of starnet ++ working on my Mac (running the latest macOS) without much of a hassle.

[@LuckyBudd]

Awesome! I had not tried that on my M1. I prob should :)

[@photogazer]

Nice tutorial, Lucky. Thanks.

[@LuckyBudd]

Cheers Mike! I had no idea how to do this 2 days ago, but really wanted to find a simple way! Hope it helps!

[@paulcolenbrander4322]

Thanks for your effort, this works for me pretty well.

[@LuckyBudd]

Awesome!!

[@DrewJEvans44]

Wonderful explanatory video. Very well done thank you. ☄️

[@LuckyBudd]

Cheers! Glad it helped :)

[@chrzanovy]

Thanks dude it works !

[@LuckyBudd]

Awesome!! So glad to hear it! Go to my instagram link in the description and follow me so I can see your results! :)

[@chrzanovy]

@@LuckyBudd already done , cheers

[@alantan6786]

Fantastic tutorial. Made it so much easier to figure out. Did you try the star reducer tool within APP as well? I'm curious why you picked Starnet over the built in tool.

[@LuckyBudd]

Haha. I forgot about it :) I’m sure it works great!! :)

[@runematthijssens2304]

Wonderful tutorial! In your final image there are no streaks of the stars visible, but in your "tutorial image" there is. Is there a trick to get rid of those or is it just meticulous cloning / content aware. Support from Belgium!

[@LuckyBudd]

To be honest, the FINAL image was made before the tutorial. Once I made my final image I thought, "Wow! I did it! I have to make a video showing how!!" So, I took a bit more care in the processing of that one. I think the streaks were likely residuals of star trails on the starless comet image from the quick stack/light pollution tool. You can clean those residual bits of star trails up with contrast/dehaze/shadows in lightroom, play around and clean up that comet layer as well as you can :) Many are much better at clean up, photoshop than I! :)

[@雨宮雄平]

Thanks for the video. By the way, how do you erase residual star trails from the final image? That's the most important point.

[@LuckyBudd]

Those little trails can be mostly taken away with contrast/dehaze in Lightroom :)

[@safinsd6612]

Brilliant!

[@jens-uweberthold1105]

very helpful video (I've been struggling with my editing for 2 weeks). what I can't find is at what minute you create the "starless tiff". I only find the "stars", the "comet_with_outlier..." and a tiff with the comet in focus and the star trails. But what you load into Photoshop is a "starless" where the line traces are missing. But where do you create this tiff??? Many many thanks

[@LuckyBudd]

I created the starless image by loading the STARS image into a program called STARNET++. It is a free download on a PC. If you can't find it, you can also try saving your stars layer, then using the REDUCE STARS tool in Astropixel Processor and click on Remove Stars. I don't know if it works as well as Starnet++ or not. Either way, you will end up with 2 images: one with a blurry comet with round stars, another with a blurry comet and no stars.

[@stephenastels8514]

This is very interesting (I got an Evo 8 at the end of December to get back into astronomy - just playing around visually so far, maybe will try a bit of EAA in a while). How much light pollution do you have to deal with?

[@LuckyBudd]

Hey! I’m in a bortle 4. It’s not too bad, esp when looking south over the ocean. I absolutely love the idas NBZ filter for Nebula. It’s amazing! The moon and light pollution aren’t too much of an issue with it. Check out my other video on Astro photography with this mount :)

[@stephenastels8514]

Nice, I’m in Bortle 8, though know people 20 minutes away in 5 that I’ll probably visit this summer a few times. Will look into that filter if I get into nebula EAA / photography. Already watched your alt az photography video, amazing! (And inspiring). You are very good at explaining the issues and methods, looking forward to future videos!

[@LuckyBudd]

@@stephenastels8514 So kind, my friend! Hope it helps!

[@markmcmanus7124]

How did you remove the artifacts in the starless image? Thanks.

[@LuckyBudd]

most of it was in the MAD projection in APP. Then some dehaze/contrast in lightroom as there wasn't too much left. Play with it a little in lightroom photoshop if you need to :) The longer your integration, it seems the more artifacts from trails you will have. Just keep playing with your settings until you get it manageable...

[@woldsweather]

I had to click on the comet 200 times and just got a green streak across the whole image. How did you manage to only click on the comet once>

[@LuckyBudd]

Hey Trevor, let me see if I can help. You are referring to the part where you are aligning on the comet? Then, in registration, it asks to you to click on the comet nucleus? In this step, it has asked me to click on the nucleus several time, but never for all. If your comet is still blurry, I would check with the forums at APP and ask them to look at your data. Before that, though, I would start from scratch and try the comet align with only 10 or so subs and see if that helps...

[@woldsweather]

@@LuckyBudd OK thnaks I had 180s 120s and 60s exps - too long?

[@josiptomljenovic1187]

Cant get sharp comet..its blurry always.. :/

[@LuckyBudd]

Try stacking only a small fraction of your images. Maybe 25 percent (all from the same time - like the first 25% you shot). If those are sharp. Do it again with 50%… see how that works.

[@abmscopes]

Hi LuckyBudd (or anyone else). I have successfully followed this tutorial once with one night's data, but with another night's data I cannot get the comet to integrate properly during the 'MAD outlier rejection' stage. I just get a smeared comet with a big patch of purple artefact near the nucleus. As far as I can tell the individual subs are fine and I did the previous 'click on the comet nucleus' stage OK. No error messages and I'm sure I've followed the tutorial to the word as I did the first successful time. Any ideas? Thanks

[@LuckyBudd]

Hey! How much data do you have? I would suggest doing some trial and error. Try stacking just a portion (maybe 1/4) and see if that gets rid of the streak/purple nucleus. Then try 1/2... 3/4.... It is possible there is something in the data that is too much or not quite right for the software. Wish I knew more, but I am also a newbie :) I would def try sifting through the data this way and see what it can handle.

[@abmscopes]

@@LuckyBudd Cool, thanks for replying. I'm trying again as you suggest as two other dates also work fine, but typically this is one I'd like to work as a) there's a better tail and b) there's a recognisable DS object in the frame; NGC1647 star cluster. Excellent vid by the way. It's the first time I've managed to process the comet separate from the stars and also the first time I've managed to merge the two in PS. I won't lie though- it took me the best part of a day going through your video frame by frame to get there! Not the fastest learner me.

[@LuckyBudd]

@@abmscopes hahaha, I wrestled with it for 3 days before I made this video! I thought "there are def others struggling with this as I did!" It is my hope that through doing it with smaller data sets and then adding more that you'll be able to figure out why it isn't working properly :) Keep me posted!

[@abmscopes]

@@LuckyBudd Yes! I think it was a SNR thing. First I sorted the subs by star shape to eliminate non-round stars, then by quality and removed the lower scoring ones. By this time I was left with less than half of the frames I started out with, but the comet still wasn't being isolated. So just now after your comment above, I went back and sorted by SNR, removing the ones where the background was much brighter. Now it is working, but with a fraction of the frames left to stack! But that can't be helped- obviously the data was not good enough despite superficially looking fine. One other issue I noted, but this is probably one for pixel-peekers only, is that after the PS merging, the stars themselves seem to lose their integrity. By that I mean when you zoom in you don't get a nice smooth white disc, but a spotty noisy disc! It's not really noticeable at normal scales so not a major issue. I do wonder though if you can think of any PS settings related to quality that can be played about with when merging?

[@LuckyBudd]

@@abmscopes I am not sure... you can maybe try taking the star layer into lightroom and playing with the settings there? Sounds like you are making some progress!