ASTROPHOTOGRAPHY PROCESSING

Make your dark nebulae shots shine

- DAVE EAGLE

Use Affinity Photo to unlock the hidden drama in stunning detail

Dark and reflection nebulae are among the trickiest targets for imagers. Teasing out details so that they stand out from the background sky, especially through bad light pollution, can be tough, and even specialist filters often don't help. How you process dark and reflection nebulae is therefore key.

Because they aren't brightly illuminated or ionised by embedded stars, dark nebulae often just look like dark patches against a rich, starry Milky Way. Reflection nebulae too don't emit their own light – they're only visible due to starlight hitting them before being reflected back towards us. As this is scattered light, these nebulae have a distinct blue colour and are often fainter than emission nebulae, which emit light at the red end of the spectrum.

We'll walk through how to use Affinity Photo to process a dark nebula image – in our case, the Horsehead Nebula, Barnard 33. Our start image (above) was a stacked set of 23 exposures combined with darks, flats and bias calibration frames, which helped reduce image noise and gradients.