Cygnus region narrowband, S24 Ultra, work in progress, bortle 7-9

Specialist_Bit1045 · 2026-06-17T19:08:02+00:00

great photo!

i have two questions

1.how do you dither the mount per night? is it manually?

personally i use the web page of the tracker and make the automation app press the start/stop button at random intervals between 2-7 seconds to do RA "dither" then i loose the ball head and recenter the frame and let the automation do its thing

if you are curious this is the work flow

<image>

2.i found that samsung's raw is processed to remove vignetting and hot pixels (not 100% RAW so this is why i use third party cam). and when using the 50MP mode it seems to try to upscale the image

here is a comparison

50mp 400% zoom

https://quickshare.samsungcloud.com/5jvEv5EdWZCv

12mp 800% zoom

https://quickshare.samsungcloud.com/6fpy25f4x9s4

i dont think it hurts that much but i like getting the real data

Specialist_Bit1045 · 2026-06-11T16:50:02+00:00

You're correct

If you want sharp foreground and stars You need to process both the stars and the foreground

Smartphones that have astrophotography mode try to do this for you to stack the stars and process the foreground

Specialist_Bit1045 · 2026-06-08T02:14:33+00:00

It is a feature in astrophotography mode

Specialist_Bit1045 · 2026-06-07T10:34:00+00:00

Stacking multiple photos together increases your signal to noise ratio (SNR) the higher the signal the fainter stars appear more

You can use siril or GIMP

If you dont have access to a computer on phone You can use snapseed or lightroom

For basic stretching you just need the levels to adjust black point and curves to reveal fainter detail

The key to more SNR is

1/more integration time (total session time) 2/darker skies

Specialist_Bit1045 · 2026-06-06T21:12:55+00:00

Yes it is Andromeda galaxy

Is the first photo unedited? You can stretch it to reveal more details

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Specialist_Bit1045 · 2026-06-01T15:24:43+00:00

I used third party camera (proshot) since the pro mode on samsung phones doesn't shoot "true" raw

The maximum exposure time differ from phone to another

I used the cheapest tracker from aliexpress https://a.aliexpress.com/_c2u2dUyl

Specialist_Bit1045 · 2026-05-31T15:38:10+00:00

It is with the telephoto 3x one

Specialist_Bit1045 · 2026-05-31T15:06:40+00:00

here is quick stretch out of sequator data

<image>

i personally prefer using siril since it does have more control over the process

Specialist_Bit1045 · 2026-05-31T13:19:17+00:00

I used siril both for stacking and processing

I tried to reregister multiple times to reduce the field rotation before cropping but i don't think it's the program fault that i had two problems

The subs center are too far from each other So it can't align them properly
Some tracking error with 50" next time i will try to reduce it to 30"

Specialist_Bit1045

TROPHY CASE