In this case we shall be looking at processing the JPG produced by a Seestar S30 from 25 minutes worth of 10s exposures of the Seagull nebula under very poor and variable transparency conditions due to clouds at various levels. In fact, cloud cover terminated the session.
It is conventional wisdom that one should not further process images that have been saved as JPGs. Whilst this is generally good advice, it is not entirely true if the JPG has been saved as a high or highest quality (100%) JPG.
In a 100% quality JPG, some information has been lost; a little in detail resolution and some in chrominance information. As long as any following processes are saved as uncompressed images as PNGs or TIFs it is possible to do a limited amount of processing of astronomical images to greatly improve the image quality. This would be of particular value to people who do not wish to stack the individual subframes captured during the session. They also have the benefit of the the processing that occurs during live stacking that can help with gradients and star shapes if the field is not completely flat, as is the case with the Seestar S30 (but not with the S30 Pro which has a much flatter field due to its quadruplet ED objective in comparison with the ED triplet of the S30).
Only SetiAstroSuitePro was used to process the JPG using Syqon star removal, Curves transformation, Cosmic clarity denoise and GraXpert denoise, Clarity and Texture, Star replacement, Cosmic clarity stellar and non-stellar sharpening. No other software was used other than what is available from within SetiAstroSuitePro.
Click on an image to get a closer view
The final stacked JPG image of the Seagull nebula
Screenshot of SetiAstroSuitePro processing the JPG
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