Flaming Star Nebula with a twist

[MikeWilson]

Good afternoon,

Without further ado; my latest image:

"Interstellar space". Nebulosity and star clusters in Auriga. by MikeWPhotos, on Flickr

The twist being that I started out imaging M35 and M36, a pair of star clusters and thought that the nearby Flaming Star Nebula and NGC 1893 were in more or less the same compositional arrangement, connected by the star Phi Aurigae and it's small emission nebulae surrounding it.

"Interstellar Space", M35 and M36 in Auriga. by MikeWPhotos, on Flickr

My next step is to attempt a mosaic of this area. I only have 9 x 3 minute subs on M35/M36 and I plan to return to these with at least an hour's worth of 5 minute subs, if not longer.

Thanks in advance for any feedback, critique or commentary!

All the best,

Mike

[Uranium235]

Good framing, star colour and nebulosity on the Flaming star, but the colours werent quite right (the background seemed very purple(ish). So I loaded it into PS and the histogram showed what needed to be done to balance it.

I will attach a before and after histogram for you (I adjusted it using levels on the individual R,G and B channels), added 5% saturation too - hope you dont mind

Rob

[MikeWilson]

Rob, that's perfect. Thank you so much - I really appreciate the time you've taken to show the histogram adjustment on the levels of all the individual channels. I'll give this a shot myself now

[johnrt]

That's a real corker Mike. Well done.

[MikeWilson]

Thanks John. It's a cracking scope too.

I've re-edited it as per Rob's suggestions. As it happens, I use a program on my PC called F.lux which actually dims/yellows the monitor according to the calculated brightness/colour temperature of the sun.. and I forgot to disable it so whilst it looked ok on my screen, the background was quite hideous for everyone else!

"Interstellar space". Nebulosity and star clusters in Auriga. by MikeWPhotos, on Flickr

Thanks again Rob.

Clear skies,

Mike

[Uranium235]

No prob mate

All you need do is to move the black point to the right, but be careful not to clip it too far, leave a bit of breathing space

[johnrt]

That is an awesome FOV from the ED80 & QHY8L too.

[Tom OD]

That breathing space left of the histogram is so important. I like the colours, a bit unusual looking and you have the blue / purplen= neb sitting on the top of the flaming section.

Tom.

[MikeWilson]

I don't think I've clipped it - I left about '4' points of breathing space clear of the precipice of the left hand side of each colour channel's darkest point.

The FOV is pretty good, although it does suffer more from curvature than a smaller chip. But working with it, I also did a few subs of M31 last night and I managed to fit the galaxy in vertically up and down on the frame which made me smile If I'd frame something like Andromeda centrally, I'd get curvature in the corners that would be difficult to crop out and I still haven't learnt how to devolute stretched stars yet.

I used a 0.8x Televue TRF-2008 reducer/flattener here.

All the best,

Mike