I did a little post-processing on the Horsehead data I captured earlier this week. Nothing fancy, just stacked the 40 x 180 second exposures using ASTAP, the Astrometric STAcking Program, applying darks and flats.

After stacking the frames I exported the stacked image to a 16-bit TIFF. Then spent a few minutes, like less than 15, messing with the levels and curves in GIMP. Once I was done tinkering with it I resized it 80% and then exported it to PNG. And here it is…

Really brought out some of the detail in the darker nebula. The bright stars are a bit over saturated, I need to figure out how to combat that. Even with all the room for improvement, I like the results.

I still have a LOT to learn about post-processing, but I’ll get there.

Since I am probably going to be getting into do this a bit more I created an Astrophotography Category 🙂 More to come…