I find the groupthink on reddit to be impossible to deal with. Many subreddits have a particular dogma then stick to and if you variate at all you get downvoted into oblivion no matter how obviously correct you are.
It even happens on subreddits that aren't as popular. Many years ago I posted frequently on /r/astrophotography, using very crappy equipment[0], but focusing on the processing part, even sharing my own python scripts.
Then one mod decided to actively undermine me, even banned one of my posts, because I didn't use PixInsight (like the rest of "the pros" do). I got my post back up, but that ruined the subreddit for me.
Funny thing, I grew up, graduated CS/software engineering, specialized in image processing and lo-and-behold, my techniques, though rudimentary, were pretty solid.
[0] old binoculars steampunk-ly tied to an old digital camera -- being a teenager with no income meant $0 budget -- but worked better than you'd imagine!
Sorry for the tangent, but that sounds really interesting! Would you feel comfortable sharing more info about how you did the processing? Astrophotography is a hobby I've been wanting to get into and learn about, but I can't justify purchasing an expensive camera for just one hobby.
Well I never formalized it in library or code that has survived to this day. But in a general sense, what you do is load your images as raw as you're comfortable working with them, and then define a pipeline that can:
* Stack or integrate: this means turning 100 high-noise images into a single, low noise image. To do that, you need:
* Registration or alignment: this is simply making sure that the stars are placed consistently on the same (x, y) location so that when you stack you don't get trails or blurring. High quality registration can go as far as sharpening your end result if you manage sub-pixel alignment (or you can strecth for super-resolution).
* Post-processing: it can be anything from removing light pollution (important if you're shooting from within a city), remove gradients (airglow, or residual light pollution even if you are far away from a city), sharpening (Lucy-Richardson deconvolution is king here using gaussian kernels, but if you can aproximate a Point Spread Function -or PSF for short- you can get even better results), color correction, high dynamic range processing. Of course, this is an un-ending place.
PixInsight is a great tool, I won't deny that. But I had a great joy in learning how to program this things, and to me it's a lot more interesting researching how to do something, learning it and programming it, rather than having it done by somebody else, clicking a button and moving away.
Luckily for both you and I, Bennedict Bitterli has written a C++ pipeline for processing with great detail that covers registration, stacking and removing gradients. That's a great read that you can find here[0]. You can still visit /r/astrophotography and treat yourself to the wiki if you want something more down to earth and with less programming involved.
The one thing most redditors there forget is that AP, on a budget, can be as fun (and frustrating too!) as throwing thousands of dolars worth of equipment to the problem. If you have a DSLR (new or old, or a mirrorless, or a compact camera, even some phones have good enough cameras) and a tripod you can do widefield astrophotography.
Isn't that the case everywhere else? I posted some stuff here that got downvoted faster than you could blink,while it would have brought hundreds of upvotes should in certain platforms. It's just an extension of people's teal life social bubbles.
