[Sticky] How I processed a comet to get nice round stars using APP

Thank you! I’ll give it a go over the weekend.

@macroscopic awesome!  Excited to see how it turns out for you!

@luckybudd Thanks! Very much looking forward to trying this out. Subcribed to your channel.

Awesome!  So glad I could help!

@luckybudd Thanks very much for this. Used it today on last night’s comet images and it worked brilliantly.

@skipstarry Awesome!!  Looks great!!  So glad it works 🙂

Stickied this post as it seems to help quite a few people, nicely done! 😉

@vincent-mod happy to do my small part, my friend!  Thank you for all you guys do!

@luckybudd Thank you! It worked for me 🙂 A very helpful video...

@charles-thody That's awesome Charles!!  So glad it worked!! 🙂

Problem is all those rejection techniques end up damaging the details in the comet tail.  I tried a lot of them with different lower and higher values.

To the developers:  we need at the minimum a batch mode to calibrate and remove the stars on all subs individually. AND then the ability to register them on the comet nucleus and stack them without the stars. 

Removing stars on the stacked image creates a lot of damage.  This effect is a less damaging when stars are removed before stacking.

Is this something we can wish for,  hope for before the next bright comet?

Yes, we moved this feature way up our list, so we are going to work on that sooner. Of course it always becomes the top most feature for everyone when a comet arrives, I get that, but we're working on multiple requests as always. 🙂

@luckbudd thanks very much for this workflow will give it a try over the weekend

@thedevelopers, this was first promised back in 2020, one of the reasons I purchased my licence, other softwares have this feature (Pixinsight) already 

Posted by: @luckybudd

Hey all.  A few days ago I was digging around here to try to get a process to stack a comet without star trailing.  I found a solution that I found pretty easy!  I made a little video if anyone finds it helpful.

thank you for the video - well done

@mike-lockwood Cheers!  Glad I could help 🙂

This is great, but I'm really struggling with the Photoshop phase. Is there any chance of taking me through that more slowly or do I just need to learn photoshop better? Somehow, the subtraction doesn't work for me and this is probably a noob-thing, but I can't figure it out myself.

Sure!  I would be happy to.  What is happening in this step is that you are subtracting the same elements out.  So, make sure the blurred comet with stars is one layer, and the blurred comet without layers is the other, one on top of the other.

Then -> Image and scroll down to Apply Image.

From there you will see a dialog box.  Where it says BLENDING, change it from MULTIPLY which is the default to SUBTRACT.  At this point, the box with your photos underneath should turn black.  

Then, in the box marked LAYER, change it from BACKGROUND to either Layer 1 or background and you should see the blend happen.  

If this does not work, let me know at which point you are stuck and i will try to help.  Maybe take some screen shots?  Cheers!

@luckybudd here's what I got

@andy-smith Looks great!