MarsG76

And I found that it can actually introduce "reverse noise"... black single pixel dots..

Personally I dither and never use darks.. I only use bias and flats. I find that all thermal noise (and only the noise) gets eradicated by the "Dust and Scratches" filter in photoshop.. set to 2 pixels at threshold 30.

Attempted taming of the run away red hue...

I guess that what happens when an object is long exposed, the general shape that gave it its nickname gets lost. Looking at it in the eyepiece it does look like a spider with thick hairy and spindly legs, seeing it in the eyepiece it is very obvious why it got its name... it is a very great looking object observationally, and huge, bigger than the Orion Nebula even though it's 100 times further...

Thank you for the feedback... I agree that the narrowband does look better than the very red pseudo RGB image...

I also put together a quick pseudo RGB image from the narrowband data... it was very red heavy (for obvious reasons) and I toned down the red a lot but I couldn't get it looking quite right.. I still think that the SHO image looks more aesthetic.

Hello Astronomers, Sharing with you my latest complete image, this is the Tarantula Nebula imaged in Narrowband and processed in Hubble Palette colors, SHO. This image came into existence because I didn't want to waste perfectly good half nights. Basically I started imaging the Helix nebula but it was obscured by 1 am, and since I didn't want to waste the nights, I chose an object rising in the south east to image until sunrise. Unfortunately the moon became too bright to continue to image the Helix, and so it was put on hold until the moon is gone, but the moon was on the other side of the sky from the Tarantula, and the narrowband filtered subs were not affected by the moon light so I completed my imaging aimed at the Tarantula. This was imaged at f10 through my 8" SCT with my cooled and astromodded Canon 40D DSLR. Filters used are the Baader SII, HAlpha and OIII 7.5nm filters. Clear skies, MG

Monitor display differences are a big factor when color balancing photos.. astro or otherwise.... to preserve the detail, try desaturating the image and use the gray scale as a Luma channel.. the color can be used as a color channel, (even gaussian blurred slightly), and you can easily adjust the hue without losing any detail, which will be preserved by the luma gray channel.

WHAT!!!!???? That looks like something I'd do pullovers with at the gym and get a crazy anterior delts, upper chest and front lat pumps...

ARGHH you reminded me... I was going to observe and image Mercury and Venus 11 days ago... they were almost next to each other.. life made me forget about it...

Very nice image.. personally I'd try to decrease such a heavy green hue.... but great image nonetheless.

The great thing about HOO is that the end result looks natural color wise...

It wouldn't be long before you miss it....

Very nice rosette.... good imaging.

Adobe DNG converter will change all new CR2 Raw files into 16bit DNG that can be opened and processed as raw in any photoshop version.

Great Result.. this galaxy is very similar the NGC300....

I did... but I didn't want to believe it.. and until I saw it for my self I would have kept on wondering... for example, what if the official distance to M42 is wrong and it's not really that far away?

Thats what happens when power is priced out of affordability.

Hello All, I was wondering whether it's possible to image a DSO and capture any depth. Every 3D astro image online is faked so at the start of the year, I decided to image M42 six months apart. Back in March I posted a image of M42 imaged at f10, 2032mm FL through my 8SE on 28th February 2019. Than on 3rd September (setup and captured 15 second subs on 1 September) I captured M42 at the same focal length, same orientation and very similar subs for a total exposure of 1 hr 24 minutes. This was almost to the day exactly 6 months between the two images, so the earth was 300 million km away from the original position on the other side of the sun, furthest I could hope for imaging a 3D stereo pair. First attached is the image from September... I color matched the above image with the image from February, aligned them and below is the end result.... As you can see there is no detectable 3D effect... There was a 3Dish effect but this was most likely due to the differences in processing of the two stacks and when I SCALE and rotate the two images to align them, and hence no 3D effect. Of course the stars and nebula are certainly not on a flat plain so I believe that the reason for the lack of any discernable depth is simply due to the distance of M42 resulting in a very small angular shift in the stars, so small in fact, that it’s beyond the sensitivity of my 8” SCT, camera pixel resolution and tracking accuracy of the CGEM. Calculation of the expected motion of any parallax shift when the Orion Nebula is 1344 lightyears away and the distance of Earth being 149,600,000km from the Sun: 1344LY = 1.2715e+16km Θ° = Tan-1(149.6e+6/1.2715e+16) Parallax Shift Θ” = 2 x 3600 x Θ Parallax Shift Θ” = 0.0048536712567150 An angular motion of 0.005” was not picked up by my system that tracks with an average accuracy of about 1” RMS, with a camera sensor that has a resolution of 1.16”/pixel at 2032mm focal length with a 8” SCT. Even if I could get consistent tracking at the best accuracy that I have ever seen with my gear, 0.38” RMS, this is still well above 0.005” and well beyond the 40D sensor pixel resolution, and all this is without considering atmospheric distortion, obviously my setup is not even close to sensitive enough. This was a good project but unfortunately the distances of objects in the universe are too great, even objects classed as in our celestial “backyard”. If I didn’t try this experiment than I would be always wondering and curiosity would most likely make me try it eventually. Clear Skies, MG

How good does that look... so much matter and detail... very nice.

Very nice result... this looks ghostly or delicate like a withering cobweb....

Really?.. surely not solar?? Wind farms perhaps....

Obviously they don't care about the environment, burning more fossil fuels to keep the lights on.