Gosforth Skies

Image processing for smart telescopes

Your Seestar already caught the light. Let's develop it.

Send me the raw frames from your Seestar, Dwarf, or any smart telescope that saves FITS files. I screen out the cloudy ones, stack the rest properly and process them into a finished picture you'll want on the wall.

See how it works

The Andromeda Galaxy as stacked by the Seestar app: a soft grey oval

The same galaxy after processing: brown dust lanes, blue outer arms and pink star-forming regions

Seestar appProcessed

Before and after

Same frames, different result

Drag the line across each picture. The left side is what the telescope's app produced; the right side is the same data after processing.

The Pleiades from the Seestar app: bright stars on grey, almost no nebula

The Pleiades processed: blue reflection nebula streaming around the stars

Seestar appProcessed

The Pleiades, M45

The app's own stack shows the stars and a hint of haze. Two nights combined and processed bring out the blue dust the cluster is drifting through.

Scope: Seestar S30 Pro
Data: 58 × 60 s, IR-cut filter, 58 min
Nights: 7 Oct, Brampton; 16 Oct, Acombe

The Heart Nebula core as a plain stretch: dim red cloud

The Heart Nebula core processed in orange and blue: sharp pillars and a glowing blue centre

Plain stretchProcessed

Inside the Heart Nebula, IC 1805

Narrowband data from a Draco. Hydrogen is mapped to orange and oxygen to blue, so you can see where each gas glows around the young cluster at the centre.

Scope: DWARFLAB Draco
Data: 36 × 300 s, dual-band Hα/OIII, 3 h
Palette: R = Hα · G = (Hα+OIII)/2 · B = OIII

Data: DWARFLAB test stack, shared for the community to process

The Triangulum Galaxy as a plain stretch: a faint smudge

The Triangulum Galaxy processed: spiral arms full of blue star clusters

Plain stretchProcessed

The Triangulum Galaxy, M33

A face-on spiral three million light years away. Sharpening and careful star handling let the arms and their knots of new stars stand out from the star field.

Scope: Seestar S30 Pro
Data: 239 frames, 20–60 s, IR-cut, 3.1 h
Night: 7/8 Oct, Brampton

Wide fields, deep narrowband

The Heart and Soul nebulae side by side in red — **Heart and Soul, IC 1805 and IC 1848**Seestar S30 Pro mosaic · 1,702 × 20 s, LP filter, 9.5 h

NGC 6188 in the Hubble palette: gold and blue clouds with dark dust — **The Fighting Dragons of Ara, NGC 6188**Hubble palette, SII · Hα · OIIIData: Telescope Live

IC 2944 in the Hubble palette: orange shells around a blue cavity — **The Running Chicken, IC 2944**Hubble palette, SII · Hα · OIIIData: Telescope Live

The Heart Nebula core in natural narrowband colour: red hydrogen, teal oxygen — **Heart core, natural colour**The same Draco data as above, Hα red and OIII tealData: DWARFLAB

The Dumbbell Nebula: a blue glowing shell with orange lobes — **The Dumbbell Nebula, M27**Hubble palette, SII · Hα · OIIIData: Telescope Live

The Andromeda Galaxy processed, landscape — **Andromeda, M31**634 frames over three nights plus 2.8 h of Hα, Seestar S30 Pro

Prints

Pictures for the wall

My own images, captured from Tyneside, Northumberland and Cumbria on a Seestar S30 Pro. Printed on fine-art paper. Tell me which ones you'd hang, and at what size: it helps decide what to offer.

The Andromeda Galaxy — **Andromeda, M31**8.6 h over three nights · landscapeA4 · A3

The Heart and Soul nebulae — **Heart and Soul**9.5 h mosaic · landscapeA4 · A3 · A2

**The Pleiades, M45**58 min over two nights · portraitA4 · A3

The Triangulum Galaxy — **Triangulum, M33**3.1 h · portraitA4 · A3

Prices to follow. For now, reply to the message that brought you here with the picture and size you'd like.

How it works

Three steps, no software to buy

Send the frames

Share the folder of individual frames, not the app's finished picture. On a Seestar that's the …_sub folder, full of Light_*.fit files. A Google Drive or WeTransfer link is fine.

I process them

Every frame is checked for cloud, dew and trailing. The good ones are stacked in PixInsight, then cleaned up, colour-calibrated against star catalogues and finished by hand.

You get the picture

A full-size 16-bit TIFF for printing, a JPEG for sharing, and a short note on what the data showed and what would improve it next time.

Prices

Starting with a pilot

Now

Free pilot

A handful of datasets from friends, the local society and the Draco group
In return: feedback, and permission to show the result here

Planned

£— single target

One night or several of the same object
TIFF and JPEG, one round of tweaks

Planned

£— narrowband or mosaic

Dual-band or SHO colour palettes
Multi-panel mosaics joined and balanced

Prices will be set once the pilot shows how long typical datasets take.

Questions

Before you send anything

Who owns the finished image?

You do. It's your data and your picture. I'll only show it here if you say yes.

Do you use AI tools?

Yes, and openly. Noise reduction, star removal and sharpening use specialist astronomy tools that run on trained models, alongside conventional PixInsight processing. Nothing is invented: every detail in the final image is in your frames.

Which telescopes work?

Any telescope that saves its individual frames as FITS files. So far: the ZWO Seestar S30 and S50, DWARFLAB's Dwarf range including the new Draco, and data from Telescope Live. If yours isn't listed, send a few frames and I'll check them first.

How much data should I send?

An hour is enough for bright targets. Faint nebulae and galaxies really reward three hours or more, and several nights of the same target can be combined.

What happens to my files afterwards?

Your frames are deleted once you're happy with the result, unless you ask me to keep them for adding more nights later.