Couple of more astropics

Wailin

A few more images from last week, including another Rossette one but with more subs added.

This is the Rossette nebula again but with 12 more subs to bring it up to 24 300sec subs, total 2hrs data. Noticeably less noisy than my last one but not as sharp either. Slighly cropped also because of stacking artifacts from adding the two sets together, colour seems to have changed from the nice pink red to slightly orange.


This is the Cone nebula and Christmas Tree cluster in Monoceros. Very faint and a bit noisy, I only done 10 300sec subs on this but I think it needs 600sec to bring it out more. Would like another shot at this one, lots of stars in the field.


Lastly is the Leo Triplet, my first attempt at faint galaxies. This image is 12 180sec subs, wish I had done 300sec but I was cramming to much into the one night (Rossette and Cone!). In future I think I will just stick to one, maybe two objects for the night!

Here is a crop of the same image:


Hope you like them as much as I enjoyed taking them

ZeRoY

Very impressive stuff! I would think that you should try and filter out more stars from the first 2 shots in post-process, it looks very busy!

Tzetze

Lovely stuff Wailin. I really envy your mount's performance. Seems to give smooth results very consistently. What processing have you applied to the images?

Wailin

ZeRoY wrote: »

Very impressive stuff! I would think that you should try and filter out more stars from the first 2 shots in post-process, it looks very busy!

Thanks Zeroy. I kinda like the starry field, but then I guess the DSO would stand out more with less? Any tips on how to remove or lessen stars?

Wailin

Tzetze wrote: »

Lovely stuff Wailin. I really envy your mount's performance. Seems to give smooth results very consistently. What processing have you applied to the images?

Thanks a lot Tzetze. The guiding is going quiet well I have to say. Here is a shot of the PHD graph:

Very consistant. I am getting fairly good polar alignment with the RA scale and I think that helps alot.

Regarding post processing, I kind of fiddle alot and don't really have a set pattern in most cases. For the Rossette I just used basic levels and curves first (first curve is just a stretch, pull the line over until it intersects the data and bring the top back to avoid clipping), then applied the "S" curve to darken the background and brighten the nebula. It responded well to this more so than other nebula I've tried such as M42. After that I used Noel Carboni's astronomy tools (thanks to the link you sent!) and used local contrast enhancement to bring out more detail and sharpen the image. I don't like to over process using his tools, mostly I just use the contast enhancement and maybe noise reduction if needed. Don't bother with all the other stuff. Also increase saturation if needed.

Basically I'm still a bit green regarding processing, I have tried layer masking, inverting etc but I need to learn more on them.

Tony

Tzetze

There's a few ways to tackle the star selection. Carboni's action tools has 'select brighter stars' and 'make stars smaller' tools.

Here's a short tutorial (2 parts) that shows another way of selecting the stars and then reducing all stars by one pixel - this really helps get rid of the pinprick stars that make an image look busy.

Finally, and my own preferred method, the start of this video by Scott Rosen shows a very handy and quick way to select all stars - then you can use the same reduction technique as described above in the youtube vid.

Wailin

Very useful tutorials Tzetze, made a huge difference to the image with just a brief test. When I get the chance I will have a proper go and post the result.

toothfairy123

wow!! excellent stuff. Keep up the good work