astrophotography tutorials

[tepickering]

a request came up on slack about tutorials about using astropy , astropy-affiliated, and the related python ecosystem for astrophotography. the basic image calibration steps (e.g. bias, darks, flats) can be handled easily by ccdproc. for color imagers, there may be extra steps to decompose the TIFF or RAW files into a FITS image per color channel. for higher level processing of images, the PixInsight package is widely used within the astrophotography community. there is a set of very good PixInsight tutorials at https://pixinsight.com/tutorials/index.html that would be a good possible starting point for ideas for similar astropy tutorials.

some specific tutorial ideas i can name off the top of my head:

• basic reduction and calibration tutorial. e.g., extracting FITS channels from color images, building master calibration frames, applying calibration data. this could be a cribbed/distilled version of https://mwcraig.github.io/ccd-as-book/00-00-Preface that uses some publicly available astrophotography data. there are various sources of raw astrophotography data. here is one example: https://www.astrobin.com/forum/c/astrophotography/other/all-my-raw-files-are-or-will-be-public-online/
• aligning and combining images. this can include calibrating WCS for images and using reproject to combine data from different cameras/telescopes.
• how to use tools like photutils and scikit-image to perform sophisticated background subtraction and gradient removal.
• an analog to the PixInsight noise reduction tutorial that shows how to perform those tasks with scikit-image and/or opencv.

[kakirastern]

Thanks for the issue @tepickering! Totally agree that there is a need for such tutorials, maybe as a theme-based series.

[kakirastern]

@mwcraig I have found someone who seems interested in following up on the issue over on the OpenAstronomy IRC channel at Element.io

[hellosagar]

@kakirastern thanks for giving me this opportunity
Im highly interested in doing this

[kakirastern]

@pikachu404 You are welcome

[mwcraig]

It would be good to flesh out a little more what this tutorial would contain or what it might be broken into. As described in the original issue, this is could be very, very broad.

[kakirastern]

Sure, let me give it a think and post a bit about the milestones and tasks for the planned PR as I conceive them

[hellosagar]

currently, Im also figuring out the main task to do with which required knowledge so if you provide me some specific thing that would be great

[kakirastern]

@pikachu404 Sure, if you come with with any ideas after some research do post them here or on the IRC channel so that we could continue our discussion

[hellosagar]

okay sure let some research then I'll get back to you

[kakirastern]

Maybe this would serve as an interesting reference as basis: https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-resources/astrophotography-tips/

[hellosagar]

Thanks