Left: the original. Right: the automated output: less prominent stars, no panda eyes.

The Milky Way offers some great wide angle views for the astrophotographer. But there is a catch: the dense star field. While in theory stars are point like, ie subpixel sized, in practice the seeing, some worse than ideal transparency, lens errors, bad focus, a not that parallel lens and sensor, a bit of dew – all work against the astrophotographer.

While I can’t solve all the problems, I sure can try. So I wrote a program. I found that I can mitigate some of the problems: the blown up stars, the panda eye image artifact around stars with middle range luminosity and the overall visual impact of the star field. I continued to develop the previous version of my software, so here’s what I’ve got now.

The program

I wrote the program in PHP because it is the language I mainly use. It is not the best choice, by far. But it does the job I expect it to do. All you need is a webserver, some storage space, memory and time. You may download it from here. (tovább…)