Processing Smart Phone Photos of the Night Sky

I started this project to see how much I can do to improve the quality of my images of the "night" sky (with Bortle 7 light pollution) using only code that I wrote myself. (no photoshop or OpenCV) I started by taking 30 photos with 10 second exposure each (top-left). After blurring each frame, I subtracted the average of these blurred frames from the originals to get somewhat less lightpolluted images (top). The trickiest part was stabilizing the images by aligning the stars on each frame. First I determined the path of around 20 stars through all the images (top-right), then fitted a "linear transformation" using least squares method. Unfortunately though, this was not able to account for the lens distortion inherent to the phone camera, so I fitted a non-linear transformation, which worked perfectly (bottom-right). Lastly, I averaged the processed frames, and increased the brightness a bit. (bottom). The bottom-left is a zoomed view of the Andromeda galaxy. The result is not perfect, but this is an ongoing project and I just started experimenting. The conclusion so far is that I should take a lot more pictures next time.

Видео Processing Smart Phone Photos of the Night Sky автора Auto Artisans