Official StarTools support forum

What's your astrobin? I would love to try and help out.

As I always post my challenges with StarTools rather than my successes I wanted to post one of the more successful images I have taken recently. I took this last night after shooting some more late season M63 frames (another thread is coming). In contest to M63 which is proving to be a troubling tar...

I don't to be the guy always posting processing challenges but I ran into another color processing challenge that I can't figure out after messing around with it all day yesterday. The problem is that StarTools is adding red rings around the stars in the image. For reference these stars should be bl...

Ok so I partially resolved the issue. It seems that the cosmetic hot pixel remover in DeepSkyStacker was treating the core of the stars in the red channel only as hot pixels. When I turned that off it resolved the star core issue. It does create a problem where I get some hot pixel noise but I suppo...

I have been manually color balancing because as you suggested it is much harder to do with a globular cluster star population. Actually since I have switched to the Atik 490 from 420 I have found that it is much harder to correctly use stars for color balance because the 490 is sooo much more sensit...

This is 3 hours total on M92. Overall it came out pretty nice with tons of small galaxies in the background field but I was wondering if anyone had tips for processing globular clusters. Specifically I'm having a lot of trouble with cap green not fixing the core of several stars near the core of the...

Having unfortunately just done exhaustive research in this area, the color of the flats don't matter in DSS. If you look at your master flat DSS is converting to greyscale and processing. I did find that my Atik flats had some artifacts when the exposure was under about 1/10th of a second and that i...

A couple of notes. First, I had an awful time getting color with the CLS filter in any program. The problem is that the CLS filter just separates the histogram too much. My colors got much better when I switched to the IDAS filter. Second, make sure that you have turned off the color calibration in ...

Just note to the original poster. I strongly strongly advocate against using Dawn for stacking. While I like Artemis capture a lot the problem with Dawn is that it does only process in 8 bit so you lose A LOT of quality vs. the 16 bits that your camera is imaging in. Dawn also does a poor job aligni...

I'm starting this thread to brain storm some ideas that the community can do the promote the use of StarTools. I have demoed or own a wide variety of different astrophotography processing products as well as Photoshop but I can say that StarTools generates the best results the quickest. Unfortunatel...