Merope & Alcyone in Blue...

[fatwoul]

First try at this revealed some problems with my PHD settings, so I goofed around with them (thanks to some suggestions from AndyUK), and PHD settled down nicely:

x14 360 second exposures in Blue only. Since M45 is famously quite blue, I thought it made sense to try and pick out that which I already knew would be there. I'm hoping that if I return to it, and shoot some R and G images, I'll be able to bring out the variety of grey and greeny-blue tones around Merope I've seen in so many pictures. Rather than inserting the blue image into the blue channel in PS, and getting a overly blue image, I instead tried simply colourising the greyscale image with a little blue for realism. Is this cheating? Should I have left it monochrome?

What this image DID show me was that, for now at least, my collimation is getting there. This is again thanks in no small part to Andy's advice and support. Cheers, Andy!

[laser_jock99]

Good idea using the blue filter- might give that a go one day (or rather night).

[fatwoul]

Cheers, lj. It seemed to work, but I guess I won't know until I try other colours. My other motivation was that my skies are horribly polluted, especially in that direction, and I hoped that the blue filter would cut out a lot of the orange glow.

[Beyond_Vision]

It's really nice to see this close in, thanks for sharing it with us

Regards

Kevin

[fatwoul]

Thanks, Kevin. Given enough clear nights (yeah right!) I'd love to use M45 as a subject for a mosaic. But for a single image, I wanted to include Merope for obvious reasons, and decided to twist the sensor around to accommodate Alcyone, as it seems to be the most interesting neighbour, due to the little posse around it.

[Darth Takahashi]

Looking really nice, you do often see a close up like this, you are definately getting lots of the nebula around Merope, great image.

[Coco]

Now thats a fine image... Not the usual which makes it all the more interesting.. I like it a lot

[fatwoul]

Thanks, Neil and Guy. Merope was my main target, but I didn't want to just plonk it in the middle of the frame when so much else is going on.

Neil and Kevin - I wish I could say the close cropping was deliberate, but its serendipitous - simply due to the focal length and chip. Having said that, I do quite like being about to pick out smaller sections of larger objects like this.