Things that Might Have Led to Improvements

One of my fellow Astrobin users recently commented that he thought my images had gotten better recently, which led me to think about why that might be (assuming it is true!).  I think maybe the postprocessing software (primarily StarTools, with a little Photoshop CS6 at the end) has improved, which made me improve along with it. The StarTools color module is definitely better than it used to be. Artistically, these days I'm tending to opt more for smoothness in my images (i.e., less noise) than for sharpness, but I'm using layer masks to try to get the best of both worlds (so I retain the sharpness where there is some detail in the image, but decrease the noise where there is no detail to preserve).

Acquisition-wise, things have definitely gotten better since I built a PicGoto Simplificado mount controller. It has made finding targets trivially easy, I think it tracks with smaller steps than the original Synta controllers did, it uses ASCOM pulse guiding, and I no longer fear re-acquiring a target after a meridian flip so it has become easy to image longer (now if that darn tree were not in the way in the west!).

 I also added a solid-state drive to my MacBook, which has made using VMWare/Windows 7 very fast (Windows launches almost instantly), so now I'm not afraid to use Windows software and I'm no longer restricted to using Mac-native software. Mac-lover though I may be, I must admit the cheap/free astrophotography software available for Windows is generally better than the Mac-native stuff.  I don't have good, hard, empirical data, but FocusPal seems to control my FCUSB better (less backlash, finer control) than Shoestring Focus (which I also like), Nebulosity (Windows) definitely finds my DSI cameras faster than does Nebulosity for Mac, PHD2 for Windows seems a bit more refined than the Mac version, all of this software supports a lot more hardware under Windows than under Mac, ASCOM (Windows only) works extremely well for running almost anything and multiple devices simultaneously, SharpCap (Windows only) is very good for lunar/planetary webcam control, PicGoto Server is Windows-only, and the combination of PicGoto Server with Cartes du Ciel under Windows is wonderful for finding things.