New member introduction and welcome to the astronomy forum - Forums

Greetings;

Just checking in new to this site. As my bio states, I am not new to the hobby, but things seem to have changed a lot and for the better I’m finding. Processing has always been my weakest skill. I’ve never used filters before but living in such a light polluted area I’ve decided to go that route. I love plate solving polar alignment, what a blessing. memories of setting up my Celestron 9.25 on an ASGT mount and telling my kids to wait while I’d polar align with an illuminating rectal eye piece to try to have better success. No wonder none of the three caught the bug although they always humored me and did love the views of Saturn and Jupiter when I was able to share. I haven’t set my new equipment up other than to take some test shots with ZWO 2600mm pro without any filters on my New ZWO 5N Mount with Asair Plus and ZWO 220mini guider in 30mm f5 guide scope. Learning all the software interface currently and hope to share my journey along with learning from all of your experience strength and hope!

One question, I am color red, green color blind. As I have aged (62), I’ve noticed that it’s become worse. There are many types of color blindness and mine has always been very limited to faint or poorly illuminated situations. Is it possible to use histograms to overcome what I visual can’t see when processing? My go to is to call someone in the room and look at my work. Any thoughts or workarounds are appreciated.

Be Blessed; Jim

Advice is always welcome,

Welcome!

I’ve helped an individual with color blindness before and I can say that it’s tough. He would always get the contrast right, but the colors were certainly whacked. I did show him how to use the histogram to get a feel for the color balance. It can be tough in astro unfortunately as different regions will differ in balance. Image the dense Cygnus region and all it’s Hydrogen Alpha, and your images will always be very heavy on the red side (assuming you’re doing RGB here). Galaxies and such have a much more balanced histogram, but even on a stretched image, it will all be scruntched up at the bottom of the histo. The one thing I can say for anyone, color blind or not, is at the end of your process, take a look at the black point on the histogram. If the dark side of the mountains do not line up, you likely have a color cast in your image. It only take a couple seconds to adjust the black points until each channel matches up, thus rendering you a fairly neutral background.

As for the central parts of the histogram, I would not tweak them all that much as it can throw the entire balance of the image off. Just black point tweaks. Beyond that, have your friend take a glance.