California Nebula and Pleiades revisited

[Andrew*]

At Kielder one and a half years ago, I piggybacked my modified Canon 450D with a manual Zeiss 50mm lens on my telescope and left it doing 30 second exposures for half an hour.

Working on the data in the morning, I was pleasantly surprised with the result:

Tonight, I looked at this picture, saw the colour wasn't quite right and wondered if it would be worth a revisit. Again, I'm quite pleasantly surprised. Of course it would be further improved with some more data.

Cheers

Andrew

[Catanonia]

Oh that is extremely nice and wide, with great contrasting colours.

Loving the dark cloud regions too and the second image is miles better processing than the 1st.

Well done sir, take a bow.

[Andrew*]

Why, thank you! Kind words indeed.

My processing skills are quite lacking, so I really wonder what the processing gurus could do with it...

Andrew

[ollypenrice]

Not a processing Guru but I would get PixInsight to have a word with the background sky and neutralize it.

But I love this unexpected juxtaposition of two old favourites!

Olly

[Andrew*]

Thanks Olly,

Where's a good place to host large files?

Cheers

Andrew

[Catanonia]

unexpected juxtaposition

ouch my head hurts

[Beardy Bob]

Nice. I've been doing a few more wide angle shots recently, but nothing as well composed as this. Nice!

Also, you've got nice round stars. Is the Zeiss an expensive lens?

[Andrew*]

Got myself a drop-box. If anyone fancies having a play with the data, I'd be really interested to see what you can do with it.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/26871129/Autosave.tif

Thanks Bob,

The Zeiss Tessar lens is an old manual M42-fit lens. Cost under £25 from eBay. These manual prime lenses are ten-a-penny, and can be excellent optically and very suitable for this kind of work as they are very fast, but best stopped down a couple of stops.

Cheers

Andrew

[nightvision]

Is that the F2.8? Really nice colour balance on the Tessar, warm but great especially for skin tones, seems to work well on the EOS.

[Beyond_Vision]

I think you will find a lot of the background stuff is dark nebulosity. Take a look at this for reference

Deep Field: From California to the Pleiades | Deep Sky Colors - Astrophotography by Rogelio Bernal Andreo

Your edit looks miles better colour wise than your original.

Regards

Kevin

[Andrew*]

Is that the F2.8? Really nice colour balance on the Tessar, warm but great especially for skin tones, seems to work well on the EOS.

Yes, it's f/2.8.

I think you will find a lot of the background stuff is dark nebulosity. Take a look at this for reference

Deep Field: From California to the Pleiades | Deep Sky Colors - Astrophotography by Rogelio Bernal Andreo

Your edit looks miles better colour wise than your original.

Regards

Kevin

Thanks Kevin. I think several more hours and much longer subs would be needed to get that stuff. For now I'm happy with the black patches, hinting at what's in there....

Andrew