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#DIFFRACTION SPIKES HOW TO#

But there is a new tool in the arsenal that I have begun using: Star Spikes Pro from ProDigital Software. Pump Up is more sophisticated and tries to find the stars so it can then apply enhancements to just the stars. Bump Up creates a small blur by literally duplicating the shot, nudging the duplicate(s) and recombining.

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We call those Bump Up and Pump Up the stars. Our Advanced Stacker Plus has two built-in ways to increase star brightness.

#DIFFRACTION SPIKES HOW TO#

How to Bring Out Star Color And Enhance The Apparent Star Size Same Photo as above, but with the Teapot Asterism in Sagittarius enhanced. Most night sky photographers try to avoid clouds and you will get an image like this: The disadvantages of using a filter are that everything is blurred – including the foreground and you reduce the amount of light collected. You can create a make-shift diffusion filter by shooting through a nylon stocking – or buy a diffusion filter. But the diffusion here is not uniform because the belt stars (Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka) and “corner” stars (Bellatrix, Rigel, Saiph) in Orion are all noticeably brighter than the surrounding stars while in this photo only Betelgeuse and Rigel stand out. One nice thing about the blur that the clouds added is the star color is more noticeable. The orange star near the top of the frame is Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion.

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The large bright orb is the star Sirius in the constellation Canus Major (Big Dog).

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Sometimes nature provides its own diffusion filter in the form of high, thin cirrus clouds as shown below. At a workshop in Alabama Hills, one of the participants, Julian Köpke, was using a diffusion filter so the stars captured would look more like you see with the naked eye. To our eyes, brighter stars stand out more noticeably than dimmer ones. 1000 ISO, f/2, 3 minute exposure with some augmented starsīecause stars are pinpoints of light, the camera does not capture them as our eyes see them.

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Diffraction spikes