UPDATED: 21-APR-2023

As I post on various topics with regards to astrophotography I’ll group some of the posts on this Astrophotography Cookbook page as a quick index to some important information and procedures.

No matter what equipment you have, the importance is to be comfortable with it and know what it’s capable of doing. Yes, there’s lots of trial and error, but that’s how you’ll learn your own particular “recipe”.

Everything in astrophotography can be broken down in four easy steps:

1. Equipment setup
   1. Planetary Imaging with a Webcam
   2. DSLR imaging
2. Image capture
   1. Wide Angle Tripod Mounted DSLR
   2. DSLR setup for city-based astrophoto
3. Pre-processing (noise reduction, alignment, staking)
   1. DeepSkyStacker for registration and stacking
   2. Stacking with DSLR (Canon 80D) RAW images
   3. Stacking Moon Canon RAW images with Registax
   4. Stacking with Landscape
   5. Manually Stacking in GIMP
   6. Star Trails – Stacking with No Alignment
4. Post-processing (tweaking the image)
   1. Creating Diffraction Spikes
   2. Creating GIF Animation from a Sequence of Images
   3. Time-lapse Video with Microsoft Movie Maker
   4. Blurring with Layers
   5. Removing Sky Gradient and Color Balance
   6. Gradient Removal with GIMP (NEW)
   7. More information on Sky Gradient Removal
   8. Isophotes to extract data from gradients (ex: comet nucleus)