Astrophotography with Landscape Foreground (Photo 2.1.0)

[David Dessert]

I'm trying to astrophotography stack 32 light, dark and bias frames with a mountainous foreground. The alignment software seems confused and the stacked image smears both the ground and the stars as shown in the captured image. The center portion of the starry sky seems well aligned but the edges are quite smeared.

I can successfully stack the photos (plain stack, not astrophotography stack) the images without alignment and get the non-rotating landscape in one image. However I can't seem to get a clean sky image using the astrophotography stack.  

Is there a way to create a mask to mask out the non-moving portion of each image (foreground objects) to exclude it from the astrophotography rotations?

FujiFilm X-T5 lossless compressed RAW images. 16mm, f/3.2, ISO8000, 10s.

Edited May 26, 2023 by David Dessert

[Lee D]

HI @David Dessert Welcome to the forums.

The app doesn't have a set workflow but you could try the following.

Stack the sky images together using the astrophotography stack persona (so it aligns based on stars). If you have multiple foreground images at longer exposures, I would stack them into a separate document using File>New Stack. Then, I would flatten both documents, copy/paste one into the other and mask the foreground of the foreground layer so you can combine both.

Hopefully that makes sense?

 

[David Dessert]

On 6/1/2023 at 6:57 AM, Lee D said:

HI @David Dessert Welcome to the forums.

The app doesn't have a set workflow but you could try the following.

Stack the sky images together using the astrophotography stack persona (so it aligns based on stars). If you have multiple foreground images at longer exposures, I would stack them into a separate document using File>New Stack. Then, I would flatten both documents, copy/paste one into the other and mask the foreground of the foreground layer so you can combine both.

Hopefully that makes sense?

 

This is what I've tried. The alignment of the astrophotography stack does not work well. I think it has to do with the static parts of the image (the ground) that messes up the frame-by-frame alignment algorithms.