It wouldn’t be a stretch to call Mike Salway one of the most accomplished astrophotographers working on the Internet today. In addition to the photographs he’s taken, Mike has gathered together an impressive community of space-photo enthusiasts at his website, IceInSpace.
Until now, Mike has always presented the final outcome of his camera work. He sometimes captures hundreds of images, in different colors of light, and then stitches them together into a single - very impressive - image or animation. In some cases, Mike’s photographs rival the images presented by large observatories, demonstrating the power of the amateur astrophotographer.
But there’s art in the science of astrophotography; much depends on the judgment of the person merging the images together. What colors do you choose for the various wavelengths you captured? How are the images merged together? What filters do you use to get the best image detail without introducing additional noise?
You might be surprised to know that almost every space photo you’ve ever seen went through this process. A photographic expert working with the observatory - or Mars rover - deciding the balance of color and any other image tricks to get the most science out. Sometimes the final result looks nothing like what you’d see with the unaided eye. Other times, it’s like you’re looking out a window.
And it’s something you can do too.
Mike has decided to open up the process to budding astro-imagers, and give regular folk the chance to try their hand at this process. On the IceInSpace forum, Salway has uploaded links to a series of images he took of Jupiter. Your job is to make the best image of Jupiter you can from them.
Here’s his introduction to the challenge:
In the continuing trend of collaborative processing tips and techniques, open sharing of information and ideas, I’ve uploaded the raw stacked images from my excellent Jupiter session on the 26th May.
The files are “raw stacked”. That means, I’ve ran them through registax to align and stack the raw frames, but have not done any wavelet or other processing on them. They have had mild noise reduction applied in photoshop (part of my usual processing routine).
Use AstraImage, Photoshop or similar tools to combine the image back into an RGB image.
An (un-inforced) requirement is that you post your processing steps when you post your version of the image. This will help everyone (myself included) learn from your method of processing and be able to compare the results.
This is a great introduction for the new astrophotographer, who wants to understand the steps involved to create a great image.
You can access the original thread on IceInSpace here, and if you do take up the challenge, post your results.
And I agree with Mike when he says,
I look forward to the seeing the results!