Seven (ugly) sisters get a makeover

[rocketandroll]

Ok, so I only managed to add another 45 minutes or so to this last night as I got called home early because my daughter wasn't well.... however, it's a bit better than the last one with about 2hrs 10 minutes total now... all in 6 minute subs.

Imaged as per the other pics posted today with my sig equipment and the Meg72 with the focal reducer in there.

Again, posting a couple of versions to see which is preferd... it's still got noise in there but only another couple of hours in 10 min subs or so will really kill that.

Ben

PS: Again, full size pics on my flickr page in my sig.

[Quatermass]

Nice shot I like the second one as it seems to have more contrast. Really should have another go at the seven sisters next time the clouds go home.

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[rocketandroll]

So... had another play and decided to do something a bit silly, see what the result was... so, I re-stacked my old version and my new version of the Pleiades together in DSS... as expected the result was over bright, horribly noisy and virtually unusable... however, it did show up some feinter stuff... so...

I then added it back in to the latest M45 image in two layers, one as a luminance layer and one as a soft light layer and played with the opacity and internal fill until it looked good... it seems to have nicely boosted the nebulosity and, due to needing to be manually scaled to match the original image, it has also reduced the noise it seems.

Dunno if people think this is a processing step too far... but it at least produces a fairly pleasing image in my opinion...

Anyway, thought I'd put it up anyway...

Ben

[stan26]

I think that last layered one is the best one Ben. Overall id say thats a very pleasing image of M45, Its not an easy target to process as Im finding, and its starting to get frustrating trying to balance eveything whilst teasing out the faint whispy bits. Im having issues with gradients, and the added problem of CA/star bloat cause by the achromatic optics. I play aroung alot between contrast/levels to minimise the noise and try not to be to aggresive with the initial stretch of the histogram. If I can get a final image of M45 that Im happy with Il post it up later tonight.....

Stan.