Watch the eighth session of Subs and Stars, an eight-part instructional online series that teaches people how astrophotos are built and edited. | SkyNews
Subs and Stars, Lesson 8. (Background image of Messier 13 edited by Paul Owen, using RASC Robotic Telescope data)

Watch Subs and Stars: Lesson 8

Watch the eighth — and last! — session of Subs and Stars, an eight-part instructional online series that teaches people how astrophotos are built and edited.

Watch the final episode of Subs and Stars, where we looked at the May 2022 data from the SkyNews Astroimage Editing Contest.

Globular clusters are groups of hundreds of thousands of stars, tightly bound together by gravity. These “faint fuzzies” contain some of the oldest known stars in the Universe. They may seem simple to edit, but bringing out star colour while keeping the core from blowing out can be a trying task.

In this session, astrophotographer Paul Owen demonstrates how to bring out the stars in the cores of these globular clusters using PixInsight. We use our free telescope data of Messier 3 and Messier 13, 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 eighth lesson of the eight-part video series to learn about processing deep-sky images.

The hosts

Paul Owen, astrophotographer | SkyNews
Paul Owen, astrophotographer

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, SkyNews editor-in-chief. | SkyNews
Allendria Brunjes, SkyNews editor-in-chief (Joel Watson)

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, May 17, 2022, at 9 p.m. ADT / 8 p.m. EDT.