Once you have finished the astronomy work, please take some time to process at least one image. Each person doing astronomy as a project – whether it’s your only one or your honors one has to complete the processing.

The processing works by stacking numerous images through Deep Sky Stacker , a PC based software (it doesn’t work on a Mac). You’ll need to download the software and follow a work flow that is fairly simple. You put in your light frames (pictures of night sky objects), dark frames (pictures from your camera at the same exposure settings but with a cap on the lens) and bias frames (pictures from you camera at fast exposure but with a cap on the lens). The software will stack the image which can then be exported and touched up in PhotoShop.

Check out the videos below for more info.

• Tutorial 1
• Tutorial 2
• Tutorial 3