What few things have made the biggest improvements in your astrophotography?

• Avoid using Photoshop; use dedicated tools instead.
• Learning how to take flats and how to properly calibrate my data.
• Learning to plan my imaging sessions in order to avoid light pollution and those high clouds which makes gradient removal very hard.
• Avoid learning AP from "popular" YouTube videos; prefer to read a book instead and don't afraid the math.
• Be extremely skeptic to anyone who try to prove that we can skip essential pre-processing steps.
• Spend a lot of time experimenting in pre-processing and avoid popular recipes which usually have mistakes.
• Pushing my equipment to its limits before putting my hand into my wallet.
• I have admitted that *I* am the weakest link in the process.

• Learning pixinsight and investing lots of time learning how to process well. Once your equipment reaches a certain base level of quality, processing and skies are really all that matter. If you want a good place to learn pixinsight, subscribe to Adam Block’s website. He is extremely thorough and an outstanding imager who has forgotten more about pixinsight than I will ever learn. Invest the time: it will make a massive difference.


• Learning that equipment doesn’t matter as much as you think. Yes, having a big fancy scope/mount can help you do things you couldn’t otherwise do, but you can make absolutely amazing images with a small refractor, modest mount, and modest camera. Mostly, more expensive gear can make life easier but that definitely doesn’t translate to good or better images. There are lots and lots of people who have extremely high end set ups but make mediocre images at best. Focus time on you and making your image capture technique and your processing as good as it can be before investing in that big scope / mount. I cannot underscore this enough.

• Autofocus. Get a motorfocuser and learn to automate it. Your images will be sharper and more consistent.
• Mono camera. You will have the flexibility to do more, particularly with narrowband. I had light polluted skies for years and narrowband allowed me to capture more / better images than broadband alone. Even if you don’t go mono, at least get a dedicated cooled camera. They make a huge difference vs DSLRs.
• Automation software. I use SGP but there are lots out there. It makes the capture process much more consistent and just easier.
• Get away from the tethered laptop and get a NUC or ASIair or something comparable. Again, this won’t help you make better images, but it will make life easier. I got a NUC that rides on the scope and runs all the software and I remote in via Teamviewer from my couch. So much better than sitting out in the cold or mosquitos.
• Finally, find dark skies. The biggest leap I experienced in my astrophotography, aside from getting a mono camera and learning pixinsight, was getting under dark skies. If you can’t, you can’t, but I promise it is worth the effort / expense if you do. You get far better, cleaner data and it is much easier to make decent images.

Ronny May:
Post processing is everything. There are so many people with highly expensive equipment but the pictures are looking like crap, sry to say that. They aren't learning new techniques for years but they are buying more and more expensive stuff. Useless... On the other hand there are great pictures with low budget equipment. But it takes most of the time to learn it. Money isn't the key.