What To Do With All These Cloudy Skies?

Why, reprocess images of course!!!! I got a hold of the Astronomy Tools plugin for Adobe Photoshop and revisited some of my recent astro snaps. The results are better, in my humble opinion. So, I will post them below for your viewing pleasure. They are still FAR from excellent but I like them.

The Astronomy Tools plug-in is pretty good. You must have the full version of Photoshop to use it. They are a series of macros that are geared towards astro image processing. It enables you to pretty quickly perform tasks including decreasing star size, creating diffraction spikes, removing noise, increasing local contrast and so on. There is a light pollution removal tool but I have not figured that part out yet. It's a nice-to-have set of tools that can improve overall image quality. I still think you need to take very good images from the outset, however.

So, here are the reprocessed images.

M31 Andromeda Galaxy:

















Sword of Orion Region:

















Double Cluster in Perseus:














Double Cluster in Perseus (with diffraction spikes!):














Okay, enough with the reprocessing! I need to get back on to capturing better images, and to do so will plan on visiting some dark sky sites so that my images aren't plagued by light pollution (or I try buying a CLS filter, but not sure yet).