M27 Dumbbell - Starting to come together!

[SJJ]

Hi all,

Here's my M27 for this year. Things are slowly starting to come together now, I still need much more practice though.

The image is made up of 22 x 90 sec unguided subs at 800 ISO, prime focus through c9.25 and focal reducer. Darks and flats (first time!) used. I've attached an un-processed sub for comparison.

Processed in photoshop elements using smartcurves plugin and a light pollution removal filter from prodigital software astronomy tools for elements. The light pollution removal has clipped the image slightly though.

I found this guide very useful for us beginners trying to get to grips with processing...

Corius Astronomy - Digital Astrophotography

Comments welcome as always

Simon

[Fenriz]

Nice effort Simon, looks good to me. Processing is something I have problems with.

[ollypenrice]

You're certainly on the right path with this one.

I'd offer two suggestions. Firstly I think the black point is clipped. The sky is very black and there is no sign of the outer shell which just might be in the original data if you looked carefully. Are you sure this is the LP filter rather than the stretching/cutting back routine?

The other would be to try to lift the red channel. Not much of the red component of the nebula is showing as things stand.

Oly

[Moon monkey]

Very nice