This is IC 1805, the Heart Nebula, as seen from the Slooh.com Canary Two Ultra Wide Field telescope on December 29, 2018. This was taken using just one reservation.

There’s actually quite a bit of nebulosity in this image and even though I used the Faint Nebula processing recipe, you can’t really see any of it in this image.

Slooh.com tries to achieve a good balance in its processing recipes but sometimes it’s just not good enough to get those faint details.

Here’s the same image however, I processed it using both MaxIM DL and Photoshop.

The difference between the two images is quite striking in that yuo can see a lot of the red nebula in the second image. I used a special process in MaxIM DL called Digital Development, or DDP.

DDP applies a non-linear stretch to an image to bring out the mid-tones more at the cost of adding noise. I used Photoshop to remove that noise and make the background even darker than what I got from MaxIM DL.

This is one of the main reasons to start processing your own photos – you’ll find that there’s actually a lot more to the images you get from Slooh.com and you can sometimes end up with some pretty dramatic results.

This is one of the main reasons I like using Slooh.com so much – the telescopes are of such high quality that you can acquire an image like this from a single reservation. Imagine what you can do if you stack the result of multiple reservations!

Interesting Content

There are lots of options for creating images – some of them are completely online! Check out these tutorials and articles about image processing all of which use free tools: