When you schedule a reservation using Slooh.com and get your images the next day, you’ll find that Slooh.com generated a number of images as shown:

In this case, Slooh.com produced two images. The one on the left is a luminance image and the one on the right is an LRGB image. For more details about what Luminance and RGB mean, consult the Image Processing section of my free book.

Sometimes you get more than one luminance and LRGB image.

In my book about Slooh.com about half of the book covers image processing. I get readers to jump right in and start processing the FITS files that Slooh.com generates for Apprentice and Astronomer members.

What I don’t do in the book is discuss what you can do with the PNG images Slooh.com produces for you. This series of articles does just that.

In this series, you’ll learn how to process your PNG images to produce great astrophotography using Slooh.com.

Here’s the Orion nebula after just a little processing covered in the first article of this series:

There’s much more detail in the surrounding areas of dust, within the nebula itself, and the center is more well-resolved.

In this series of four articles you’ll learn about the basics of combining luminance with color images, using DDP to stretch your color images (DDP is an advanced process and is often found in costly software; I show you how to do it for free), performing nonlinear stretches on your images, and how to recover an image that has uneven field illumination.

I suggest that you review each article in this series because I assume you’re already familiar with the processes I introduce in earlier parts of the series.

Here are all of the parts that make up the series:

If you are ready to progress to the next level of image processing, try using Slooh.com’s integrated FITS viewer/editor to make use of the FITS files from your missions: Using Slooh.com’s JS9 FITS Editor To Create RGB Images.

I hope you enjoy this series and find it helpful.