Los Angeles Astronomical Society

Deep Sky Imaging in Severely Light Polluted Skies

A Technique for Removing the Light Pollution

by Vance Tyree

We have been imaging deep sky objects from Garvey Observatory for a couple of years and I have been removing light pollution using an image processing tool called PixInsight which works very well for imaging deep sky objects from Garvey Observatory. Unfortunately, PixInsight has a rather high license fee (about $250.), so it is not very reasonable for people who are newly starting in astrophotography. With that issue in mind, I recently developed a light pollution removal method that only uses a free image processing tool called GIMP. This new method has worked fairly well so far, so I would like to make it available for other people to try. I think LAAS members who are interested in astrophotography may be motivated to do deep sky images from their urban back yard.  Continue to the article ->