u/SilverHot3244

Novice with a Heritage 100P telescope here, observing from a Bortle 6 city. While I mainly enjoy visual astronomy, I also like experimenting with astrophotography using my iPhone 12 Pro. I’m currently learning how to process images and exploring what my setup is capable of. Since I’m still very new to this, I’d really appreciate any feedback or suggestions from more experienced members of the community. The Sun and Moon images were created by selecting the single best frame with the help of PIPP from 4K 60 FPS videos and then processing them by hand. I tried stacking, but it actually resulted in more blur and artifacts rather than improving the image. I suspect this is due to my non-tracking mount and a slight wobble in the phone adapter. For Jupiter, I used AutoStakkert!. Thanks for your help, and I hope you like my photos. P.S. Today I’m hoping to try a double exposure with the Moon and the Beehive Cluster as the Moon passes through it.

Hello everyone. This might be useful to some of you. I’m a hobbyist observer living in a light-polluted city, and I enjoy using my Heritage 100p to find interesting star patterns from my apartment. Recently, I started using https://nova.astrometry.net to document and verify my observations by taking photos with my iPhone and a phone adapter.

I quickly discovered that, for the plate solver to work reliably, I need to manually process my images first. The main challenge is reducing false stars caused by noise, especially since my photos don’t contain many real stars to begin with. I initially started with basic image editing techniques, such as adjusting levels.

To streamline this process, I built a small web app AstroPrep (with the help of AI tools) for preprocessing my photos: https://astro-mu-woad.vercel.app. It produces outputs like the example shown, which can then be solved faster and with a higher success rate, for instance: https://nova.astrometry.net/user_images/15196492#annotated.

Just to clarify, the goal of the app isn’t to make the photos look nicer, but to make them easier to solve with tools like https://nova.astrometry.net by isolating actual stars and reducing noise. There are several parameters that may need tuning depending on your image.