I have been playing around again with the microscope and Helicon Focus. Now although this is not deep-sky imaging, a lot of the data collection and data processing is very similar to deep-sky work. First of all you need to locate your subject, in this case a Morpho Rhetenor butterfly wing. Then a number of subs are taken with a digital camera – but in this case each “sub” is taken at a slightly different focus so that Helicon Focus can add all the “subs” together to give a highly magnified image which looks all in focus, even though parts of the image are at very different heights. This “all in focus photomicrograph” gives the image the look of an SEM (scanning electron microscope) image – with one big difference – it’s in colour!!! Finally, the “stacked” dataset has been fractally sharpened by Noel Carboni to give the resulting image below.
