Afocal - Ring Nebula

[Zaphod360]

Hi All,

This is only my third astro pic (a couple of Jupiter's and this), they've all been Afocal, just playing about really before I plump for going all in and getting a DSLR.

Anyway, I thought I'd have a go at an Afocal DSO and went for the Ring Nebula. On my LX5 you can only do 8 sec exposures so I did a few, stretched and stacked. I was surprised to get anything actually.

I know it's a bit rubbish, but with what I've got I was quite chuffed.

I'm trying to convince my other half to get me a Cannon EOS 1000D for crimbo

[spaceboy]

Looks good to me!

[jimmyjamjoejoe]

Damn sight better than the view through my scope a few minutes ago

[jasonp]

Very Impressed nice one.

[JimStan]

I took your jpeg and put it into photoshop for just a few minutes ( very quick job ) and got this for a result! I think you will be extremely happy after you take a bit more time with the data ! I know the stars are blue, but this was a very quick run through.

[Zaphod360]

I took your jpeg and put it into photoshop for just a few minutes ( very quick job ) and got this for a result! I think you will be extremely happy after you take a bit more time with the data ! I know the stars are blue, but this was a very quick run through.

Ooooo, that looks better, can you steal me in the direction of what you did?

[staryeyes]

Great image for the afocal method, i would be more than happy with it.

Also great job Jimstan on the adjutments

[ollypenrice]

Remarkable to get so much this way. Well done.

Olly

[JimStan]

I compiled a few remarks that basically outline the procedure that I used. This is not original with me, but several others have done the same thing, with great success. Read through these paragraphs, and you should understand it pretty well. Here are the remarks:

"Great Bear" is using a technique that produces really fantastic results. You just have to have a photo processing program that can work with layers.

Use the clone tool ( on the layer ) to "paint out" the galaxy, use the Gaussian Blur tool to eliminate the fine detail in the layer and select "difference" to make the layer work against the background color.

Back down the opaqueness of the layer so the background and negative background values cancel each other out. You will end up with an almost black sky and the gradient will be almost gone !

Hope you can figure it out from our discriptions. The technique is a GREAT one to learn !

Jim S.

Multiply seems to be too radical . You almost have the technique I use, except I use "subtract", and then vary the opacity of the subtraction layer until the background gets to be as dark as possible, without losing the midtones. You will notice that the smaller galaxies are almost gone, and a great amount of the arms of M31 have disappeared, as well, Smeg!

You can correct the color with the color settings. I like to use the one that gives multiple windows and works on the individual channels one at a time. I generally use the dark and the midtones to get a "neutral" black background. The arms in my process are possibly a bit dark, but if I tried to increase their intensity, the background started to get mottled. Probably a result of the extreme light pollution that was evident in the original photo.

Solution: more lights and darks ? That would probably have resulted in a need for less extreme processing. All in all, it IS AMAZING what you can accomplish with digital processing ! I am certainly no expert at it, but I am learning!

Jim S.

From another "lounger"

　

Ok here is a quick run-through.

Here is what I did (all in Photoshop):

Balanced colors with Levels, minor stretching with levels

stretched with curves, then darkened up some more with levels

ran a rough pass of GradientXTerminator

i ran a few actions of mine, but basically did some dynamic enhancement (multiple layers with different blend modes), more stretching and balancing out

ran a finer pass of GradientXTerminator

I didn't run any other noise reduction - you could always add this afterwards.

Thats about it for now, I might play with it a little more later but it is pretty noisy so might just leave it be. Also, you have some streaky stars so looks like you had some telescope movement for a couple of subs - if you examine your single subs and don't include those in the stack it will help the overall image as well.

I would suggest to do flats and darks. The flats will help with your gradients and the light fall-off on the edges and the darks will help get rid of hot/cold pixels so will help the noise.

How long were your subs for this?

Hope this helps some.

[Zaphod360]

Cheers, I'll have a play and see what I can do.

[theodoros1978]

all shots count and give data! well done on afocal ring, not an easy job!