Deep sky astrophotography is a hobby that requires mastering several skillsets. The mechanical knowhow needed to record good deep sky data doesn't necessarily overlap with the skills required to turn all those data into beautiful images. In fact, these days, you don't even need to acquire your own image data — you can buy time on a finely tuned telescope located under dark skies. You can even work with images acquired by NASA observatories like the James Webb Space Telescope. But regardless of where and how our photons are gathered, it takes powerful image-processing software — and an understanding of how to use it — to turn those ones and zeroes into dazzling portraits of nebulae, star clusters, galaxies and the occasional bright comet.
I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is there is no ‘Astronomy Picture of the Day’ button in any software I've seen — you really have to work the image data carefully to produce a nice result. The good news is that it doesn't take many steps to get there. And while there is a host of software you can use, among the most popular for amateurs today is , or (). This program operates on any platform and is written by astrophotographers astrophotographers. It uses a modular, open-architecture system that encourages users to develop their own add-ons and scripts, which in turn fosters the growth of a large online community to share these can cover almost any task you'll likely encounter in astronomical image processing. And while it was developed with a focus on deep sky imaging, it has many tools to improve lunar, solar and planetary images. Here are some basic processing steps that I use that will illustrate the program's utility.
