North American Nebula - widefield

[rocketandroll]

Hi all

Ok, so I had a bit of a marathon session with my new f2.8 lens last night :-)

I made the decision after shooting the 'realm of galaxies' to try a few nebulae as they started coming up...

This is the North American nebula (NGC7000). The pic is by no means fully processed yet... but it's getting there.

This is again shot with an Eos350D (modded) with the Canon f2.8 200mm USM prime lens on a HEQ5-pro with no guiding.

This is about 35 minutes of data in 50 second subs.

I love all these targets near the milkyway with the widefield lens... the starfields are just stunning!

Comments and advice appreciated.

Ben

[eliot]

I find these wide deep shots really interesting. Great shot.

[rocketandroll]

Cheers Eliot!

There are some subjects (like this one) that you can really only capture with a widefield lens like this... unless you get into mosaics etc.

I'm wondering if I can actually do a mosaic of a large area around this area using this lens... In a few nights I recon I could end up with a 30mp+ sized area of the milky way with a few nebulae and literally millions of stars visible... That'd look pretty impressive.

Ben

[Psychobilly]

Nice and will only smooth out with more data

yep can do mosics with just about anythign .. although it becoems "interesting" if you use too short a FL lens... the 200 will be fine...

I used to shoot mosaics at longer FL but these days just shoot wider fields using shorter FL lenses...

Theres a coupel with the Canon 50mm f1.8 EFII (nifty 50) here... they are mosaics...

I have fairly recently bought a coupel of L series zooms the 240-105 f4L IS USM and the 70-200 f4L USM for "astro"... Primes are always better but I wanted the flexibility that the zoom offer especailly as I also added the Tamron 10-24 DiII which gives me a gapless FL range from 10mm-200mm( 35mm equivalent) with just 3 lenses...

Peter...

[old_eyes]

Very nice image Ben. That lens/camera combination lools a belter.

Thanks Billy for the link to some very nice widefields I missed. Interested in how you get on with the zooms as they are much easier to get hold of than primes.

old_eyes

[ollypenrice]

Good stuff.

I think that mosaics from lens images work really well. In my case using large pixel CCD I get a poor sampling rate but in a mosaic you can still have a big picture when no individual panel needs to be more than 50% of full res. Also the wide field pics look even better as ultra wides!

I have only done a few lens images but I find that being in focus is super critical at these fast f ratios. I also use drastic star reduction by creating a separate star layer (Noels Actions or Martin B's excellent tutorial on here), applying the minimum filter and then Edit to ease it back. There may be a better way. Eg

http://ollypenrice.smugmug.com/Photography/Widefield-images-including/CONE-ROSETTE-HARGB/1178011112_8HpnY-X2.jpg

Olly

[rocketandroll]

Good stuff.

I think that mosaics from lens images work really well. In my case using large pixel CCD I get a poor sampling rate but in a mosaic you can still have a big picture when no individual panel needs to be more than 50% of full res. Also the wide field pics look even better as ultra wides!

I have only done a few lens images but I find that being in focus is super critical at these fast f ratios. I also use drastic star reduction by creating a separate star layer (Noels Actions or Martin B's excellent tutorial on here), applying the minimum filter and then Edit to ease it back. There may be a better way. Eg

http://ollypenrice.smugmug.com/Photography/Widefield-images-including/CONE-ROSETTE-HARGB/1178011112_8HpnY-X2.jpg

Olly

Cheers Olly

Yeah, the stars are starting to get a bit overpowering on this... I'll have a go at re-processing it with a seperate star layer. The massive star field thing is cool at first, but does become a pain when you try and eek more life out of the feint nebula and it's real hard not to just burn out all the stars.

What do you recon with the focus on this and the other two pics I put up from the other night? I marked focus earlier in the weekend on clouds and a high altitude jet, and set it to roughly the same at the start of this session... it looked right in the first subs I took so I just stuck with it... I was worried that it takes me 20 mins to get focus on my meade scope, and took about 2 mins to get focus on this :-)

That cone-to-rosette image of yours is one of the reasons i bought this lens :-)

Is that just one shot with this lens, or is that a mosaic?

That's the sort of thing I was hoping to do, but perhaps around the North American... perhaps over to the cocoon nebula... though that's quite a big patch.

How much data is there in that cone-rosette image just out of interest? I am sure it's way more than my pathetic 20 odd minutes :-)

Cheers!

Ben

[EdF_uk]

Lovely image. Thanks

Ed