Stars: they’re one of the most important parts of any astrophoto — they’re even in the name of our show! — but fixing them is a step in the process that even some of the best astrophotographers miss.
In this session of Subs and Stars, astrophotographer Paul Owen demonstrates how to create perfectly soft stars in your astroimages using star shrinking and star recovery in PixInsight. We use our free telescope data of Messier 106, collected with the RASC Robotic Telescope.
Produced by SkyNews, Subs and Stars is a primer in astrophotography and astroimage editing using PixInsight. Join Paul and SkyNews editor-in-chief Allendria Brunjes in this seventh lesson of the eight-part video series to learn about processing deep-sky images.
The hosts
Paul Owen was introduced to astrophotography in 2013, and bought his first serious telescope not knowing then what he would need — just know what he wanted to do.
After a very steep learning curve full of victories and disappointments, he started capturing images of night sky treasures. He began shooting sunrises, sunsets, moonrises, moonsets and various Moon phases, constellations, odd cloud formations and more. Diving deeper into the full spectrum of deep-sky astrophotography, he focused on these types of images around five years.
Since then, his night-sky imaging has improved. His images now appear in newspapers, calendars, magazines and websites, and he teaches online tutorials to others wanting to start their journey into astrophotography.
Allendria Brunjes, editor-in-chief of SkyNews, is a newbie when it comes to astrophotography. Working as a journalist for more than a decade, her background is in news photography.
She knows her way around Photoshop, and her DSLR has ridden on dirt bikes, worn cattle dung from bull auctions, felt heat from fires and almost fallen into more bodies of water than she cares to admit.
These days, Allendria’s camera and telescope are in dry bags awaiting the next canoe ride. She enjoys sketching night sky phenomena, and her astrophotography portfolio includes pictures of the Moon, aurora and eclipses. She is excited to learn about deep-sky image editing with the viewers of Subs and Stars.
This session was recorded on Tuesday, April 19, 2022, at 9 p.m. ADT / 8 p.m. EDT.
