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IC4628 - The Prawn


andrewluck

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Took a trip to Namibia last month to experience some truly dark skies. I wasn't disappointed!

This is the result from 9x 10 minute exposures using my QHY9C with an FSQ106.

Stacking in Maxim; processed in Pixinsight. Image has been reduced to 40% original size.

Andrew

post-26516-0-84296800-1436095420_thumb.j

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Lovely, I am a sucker for wide field and this one is very nice.  Do you do any star size reduction in PI?  I often find they overwhelm the subject  and my wide fields benefit from a bit of reduction.  Just in case you haven't come across it before here is a very useful tutorial:

http://www.deepskycolors.com/archive/2011/09/08/star-size-reduction-via-Morphological-.html

Mike.

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Thanks for the kind comments. There is some MT reduction for small to mid size stars here but I kept it very light in effect; I find I can produce small bright blue stars very easily with it!

Andrew

Very nice widefield image Andrew with a natural processing and feel to the end result.

Maybe experiment and adjust the black point to help darken background sky colour, a little extra contrast will help with the bright and dark nebula and add a dramatic feel.

I presume you use a star mask to protect other elements of the image when using MT?  If so, you can de-saturate the stars afterwards (small adjustments, multiple iterations) to remove any unwanted colour taint.  Using 'morphological selection' in MT with low values of 'amount' and 'selection' (eg 0.20) and a few iterations can help tame star luminance without distorting shape.

HTH

Barry

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Hi Barry

I agree, it could use a slightly lower black point. One thing that caused me problems with this image is there's very little of what you can usefully call 'sky background'. For neutralising the background I used the small dark cloud on the far left. Everything else is either nebula or star! The trouble with viewing images online is that the viewer's monitor will have a large impact on what is seen. I'm one of those people still using a CRT :smiley:

For me, the stars are a major part of this image with the gradation between the rich star field on the right fading in the thicker dust as you get further left.

I've given an overall boost to saturation as well:

post-26516-0-96595600-1436129280_thumb.j

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