To whom it may concern -
I am an IT professional currently working with researchers’ IT needs at a university by day. By night I am an amateur astrophotographer. The
images from this facility are incredible. I wanted to know how photos are stacked, and the data is processed, as in the software used? 3200MP is a lot of data, I take it its not deepskystacker and photoshop. Thank you in advance.
The data are processed using the LSST Science Pipelines. The primary implementation language is Python and, where necessary for performance reasons, C++ is used under the hood. Thanks very much…
There is often a misconception regarding the distinction between amateur and professional astronomy, so people sometimes hold preconceived notions about them. Regarding images, professional astronomers are not interested about aesthetic - but the information! They do not consider them visually, but as a set of numbers from which they extract information. Even more, there are valuable information there that even can not be seen by human eyes. And yet even more: most of images will never be seen by humans!
As far as stacking is concerned, images are usually not stacked to get multicolored image, but to increase the signal from faint objects.
On the other hand, amateur astrophotography is focused on visual goal, so the images are stacked in order to get multicolored ones. Further, they can be edited using appications you mentioned or other ones.
Therefore, I would not compare amateur and professional astronomy in this context, and particularly do not underestimate the former! They are both equaly valuable, but for different purposes. Even more, Rubin Observatory has Education and public outreach team whose activities are dedicated to general audience, so they certainly make some beautiful images!
The science pipelines are made for command-line/batch processing in UNIX-based systems (Linux/MacOS). The pipelines support user-defined CCD cameras, so in principle a very motivated amateur with a monochrome CCD could use the pipelines to process their own images. I doubt they could process images from colour CCDs and CMOS detectors like most astrophotographers probably use, though.
Thank you for answering my question.
Thank you for your reply. Being that there are obvious differences between what I do, and what the pros do is why I was asking. I am never done learning. This is only reinforced by the fact that I work in research IT. I build and configure systems for instrumentation, so its good for me to stay current. Good luck to you and your work.
Thank you for answering my question.