Saturdays are for processing

We are under a winter storm warning here in the metro Atlanta area. Which means it’s cold, but we haven’t had anything. So it’s time to brush up on my image processing skills!

Yesterday we finally bought a new computer. Being a couple of teachers, we don’t have a lot of funds for the best rig, but we needed something other than the 2013 Macbook Pro and the Windows computers provided by our district (which you can’t load astro software on without a year of committee meetings anyway). So we ended up with a 17.3” HP from Best Buy. It only had 16GB of RAM, I really wanted at least 32GB for what I want to do, but the deal was REALLY good and fit the budget. So I’ll start the processing and go have a couple of cups of coffee while I wait….

Processing from the Seestar (egg sandwich for scale) - photo by author

Since it IS cloudy, I’m going back through some older .fit files and reprocessing the images to practice. I’m using Siril as my processing software. It’s free, and has a large community of users that are happy to help this amateur learn.

Since these files can get pretty large and numerous, I keep them on a 4TB external drive, that way I can pull the files from my Seestar and then free up space for more imaging later.

I’ll post an image of M51 that was taken and processed with the Seestar. It has an onboard stacking, processing, and denoise feature, but I wanted to see what I could do with Siril. So here’s the Seestar image. In a future post I’ll add my image. Maybe….

M51 Whirlpool Galaxy - photo by author on Seestar S50