RASCTO Astrophotography Club Session #2

Astrophotography for Everyone: Image Editing Using PixInsight and Hubble Space Data
Presenter: Mehdi Bozzo-Rey

Mehdi Bozzo-Rey has kindly offered to teach a two part workshop that will include a 2-hour instruction session on how to use PixInsight, as well as how to access the Hubble Legacy Archive, followed by a 2-hour workshop in the DDO's classrooms where you will have the opportunity to practice your newly acquired skills with other members.

Astrophotography has never been so affordable and accessible, but has its own challenges:
• Start-up costs (a scope, camera, mount, software, vehicle, etc.)
• Time (late night observing, travel to dark sky sites)
• Knowledge of what to use and when
• Weather Conditions
• Light Pollution
• Right combination of Hardware and Software

Luckily, international agencies like ESA and NASA are making data acquired by ground based and space telescopes available to the public. Using and processing this massive amount of data into inspiring pictures then becomes a matter of training, makes citizen science a mass reality and astrophotography affordable for everyone.

We will learn in this tutorial how to use the Hubble Legacy Archive website for searching and retrieving data. After a quick introduction to PixInsight we will go through a real processing example. From the original crop to noise reduction and histogram transformation using masks, we will expose a basic processing flow for galaxies, using the tadpole galaxy as example.

What You Will Need to Bring With You
• Laptop (not too old) running Windows, Linux, or OSX
• PixInsight: http://pixinsight.com/ (note: needs to be downloaded and installed in advance). You need to request a 45-day trial license here: https://pixinsight.com/trial/index.html
• HST Dataset for the tadpole galaxy (note: needs to be downloaded in advance): https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bx9Z-aVHtqoJM05oR0NiN1RyajQ

Who can attend: Members (Not a member? Go to www.rasc.ca and click "Join Now")
Reservation not needed
Location: David Dunlap Observatory