Michael‘s Astrophoto Blog

When I started with astrophotography last year I exclusively worked with free software for the post processing tasks. I mostly used SIRIL and a little bit of Gimp as tools. Some of the early results I have shared in this blog. They were ok at the time, but I knew that I wanted them to become better in the long run. So early this year, during galaxy season, I was starting to search for the software environment I would be using during my next steps. In principle the free tools can be used to produce extraordinary results much beyond what I was doing at the time. However, I felt that there may be limitations at some point and apparently most astrophotographers are switching to other tools eventually. As a result of that there is very little information available about how to use the free tools specifically in astrophotography beyond the very basic tasks.  I tested a few solutions, but eventually decided for PixInsight, apparently a pretty large number of astrophotographers are using t...

Starting with astrophotography was quite a steep learning curve for me. Though I felt that I had a reasonably good grasp of many of the general concepts - the reality of making all components work well together was something different. At the beginning large portions of the observing nights were spent battling all kinds of technical issues with the new equipment.  In this post I want to describe some of the bigger or smaller issues and pitfalls I encountered. Many of them may be specific to my situation and equipment, but perhaps it gives some idea on what to look out for. Don’t trust Indi device defaults The Indi drivers for most devices come with a large number of device settings. As a beginner I was not always clear on what each of them does and/or why I may want something different. My assumption was that the default settings are good enough to get started and changes can be left for fine tuning at a much later point in time. However, when taking and processing the first pictur...