Welcome to U235 Astrophotography

Many of us view the incredible images by Top Imagers at AstroBin and wonder to ourselves can I achieve the same? There are many factors that need to be considered but the short answer is We don't stack nearly enough but how much is enough?

This website takes a scientific approach to the problem by analyzing all aspects of a telescope, camera, observatory, and of course the deep-sky object.

As you know some deep-sky objects (what I call Targets) are brighter than others. The bright ones don't confound us as much as the faint ones. The stressful part is that we know that the faint ones require more stacking but will it take 5 hours, 10 hours or more? Are my skies and equipment good enough or should I just pass on it?

I highly recommend reading the Help document. It takes only 15 minutes but gives a good foundation. Plus there is a section on advanced techniques for imaging Open Star Clusters.

It's all about the total signal-to-noise ratio of the final, stacked image. Here are some useful goals for different levels of expertise:

Beginners should shoot for SNR 10. You might not win an award but you will be thrilled with the results. (Note: In the beginning choose brighter targets, and then go for progressively fainter ones as you gain experience.)

Intermediate imagers should shoot for SNR 20-25. This will get you close to Image-Of-The-Day (IOTD) territory.

Advanced imagers should go for SNR 30+.

Be creative! Don't settle for your current everyday seeing conditions. Using this web application you can take your equipment on the road. If you live near city lights with Bortle 7 conditions, see what impact Bortle 4 has on your total integration time. You will be pleasantly surprised. Also, consider using this tool before making radically new telescope or camera purchases. Avoid disappointment.

This is a single page application which means that it exists and runs in your browser's memory so that the user interface is highly responsive. Moreover I've designed it so that it never needs to access the web server again. The benefit is that you can travel with it on your smartphone to places where internet access is non-existent. Just keep your browser tab alive and don't hit the refresh button.

This application requires storage for when you enter details about your telescope, camera, observatory, and targets. Conventional web applications write data to a database through the web server but since that violates my design goal I chose to write it to browser local storage. The disadvantage of this technique is that your data is accessible only from that browser on that device; you are not able to move to another computer without having to re-enter information.

This is an open source project with the source code available at GitHub. See the footer for more details.