19.5 hour Bubble in 2 nights!

[ollypenrice]

What a run of nights at the moment! Flat calm, clear, dry and with FWHMs of around 1.5 you can't fail. I took this with SGL member Branchman. It has 10 hours of Ha (4 of which I took with Tom O'Donoghue last year), 130mins per colour channel and 3 hours of Luminance.

Tricky to deal with the blue stars against the Ha background but I dreamed up a new way of doing it which no doubt has already been dreamed up many times. Though it took a day to process that was the only really hard part. Every sub was used and the EM200 continues to shine, viz the guide trace below.

PS sorry about hte red artefact top right, now corrected.

[Spikey]

What a gorgeous picture ! But look at that trace !!

[psemil]

Yep nice picture.

[ollypenrice]

I know, but it has been a long time coming. It seems the mount didn't like my other guide cameras for some reason and also needed a shim to reduce end float in the Dec worm. But now we are getting our five grand's worth I guess! About time and thanks to Pieter Vandevelde for the idea.

Olly

[Black Knight]

That is a fantastic picture Olly. 19.5 hours of data? Wow! I completed 3 hours on the cocoon nebula last night, and I thought I was doing well ....

Oh, and my guiding graph looks nothing like yours!

[thegoatboy]

that is stunning!

[Shibby]

Amazing image olly, I have never seen that much nebulosity detail around the bubble before!

[Earl]

Cracking image Olly.

I think your recent images have gone a long way to show how busy and colourful that inky black above our heads really is !

[pietervdv]

Hi Olly,

Really nice, and what an exposure length! Who would've thought that such a stupid piece of plastic could fix a mount like that. Glad to hear it did the trick.

many regards,

Pieter

[vdb]

Really Really nice ... with that much Ha data this screams for an encore with OIII en SII !

Yves.

[Darth Takahashi]

Great image Olly as usual but for 19.5 hours its looking a little noisy still in the Red background channel, what camera did you use, an OSC???

Reading more closely above its not clear to me, at least it must be a mono ccd for the H Alpha part taken last year. Can you post the H Alpha as well?

[ollypenrice]

Great image Olly as usual but for 19.5 hours its looking a little noisy still in the Red background channel, what camera did you use, an OSC???

Reading more closely above its not clear to me, at least it must be a mono ccd for the H Alpha part taken last year. Can you post the H Alpha as well?

You're right, Neil and I've gone back to it to look at that this morning. All this was in the mono camera. The background Ha is very faint in places so ten hours wouldn't nail the noise at F7. But I'm not up for another ten!! I should have given the Ha more NR on the faint signal, really. Here's a cleaned version and the Ha. I can live with it I reckon.

Olly

[JCJC]

Really nice Olly. I love the way you get the stars to 'pop'! Also, the layered look the Ha has is great, 3D

Jordan

[ollypenrice]

Cheers Jordan,

I've been thinking hard about stellar processing recently and have come up with a few things that work for me. Here's one; put a copy image underneath. Get the star colour on that that as right as you can. Blur the image big time. Up the saturation. The idea is to blur the true star colour deeper into the stellar cores. Now go to the top image and magic wand select the key stars. Expand and feather the selection, then erase over the lot to let the intense blurred star colour through from below. That big blue nuisance above the Bubble had this to get a hint of blue into the white. It looks miles better for it.

I never used to pay enough attention to the stars but now I think they are really important. If ever I reduce them I up their brightness at the same time or they just look like mushy flecks.

Olly

[Catanonia]

Simply stunning Olly with ridiculous guiding I can only dream off. The bubble really shows well in the dep red neb colours and have managed perfectly not to "over do" the image.

Interesting reading your processing techniques, I am too concentrating on stars more in the overall image.

Envy yournkit and location and of course talent

[MikeD]

stunning, nuff said.:headbang:

Mike.

[Andrewsean1985]

Gorgeous picture! Hope to produce pictures like these :-)

[Darth Takahashi]

Olly, the H Alpha looks really nice, maybe a very light ACNR in PI would smooth it a little without losing any of the detail before you mix it with the Red channel. Anyway its a beautiful image of the Bubble and its certainly deeper than I have seen so far.