RGB Processing Hubble Data In Siril



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There is a great deal of incredible data that the Hubble Telescope has collected.  You can download it for free on the archive site.

To practice monochrome processing, you can try it yourself.  

Go to Hubble Legacy Archive and enter the site.

Search by name or catalog number.  In this example I’ll just type in Orion Nebula.  On the advanced search section, you can narrow your search.

I downloaded 3 files, one for Red, Green, and Blue.

Save these to your hardrive.

Open Siril.  Normally you will need to convert your images to fits file format.  Hubble data is already in fits so you can now go directly onto RGB Compositing.

Navigate to Image Processing ->RGB Compositing

To the right of the colors, click on the open button and select the correct fits monochrome color data for each color.

Once they are loaded, you can preview the image on the RGB color tab.

Star Alignment

You might notice that the stars are off since we did not register the images.  You an align them in Siril by drawing a box around a section of one of the colors, then selecting “and use this alignment method”.  Select “Image pattern alignment/Deep Sky”.  Press “Align”

Now the three channels should be aligned.  You can further edit the image or download a version.

Here is my first attempt at processing the Orion Nebula.  I was pleased with the level of detail in all three channels.

This image was processed from three monochrome images using Siril and then edited in GIMP. The raw data is from the Hubble Space Telescope

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