M27

[Grant]

A shot from tonight of M27, using ED80, 350D ISO800, exposure time - a couple of minutes...

If you fancy having a go at the processing, I've uploaded the original jpg and raw to: http://iseestars.net/astro/M27.zip

Cheers,

Grant

[Nessy]

Excellent...gives me hope for my 400d!

[geppetto]

Sure is nice to see ol' M27 again 8)

[barkis]

Another favourite of mine old 27. Great colourful and distinct image Grant.

Somebody's gonna tweak it better though, just cos. they can don't you know.

Ron.

[MikeD]

Great shot , stars look a little too blue though.

[MartinB]

Well done Grant. You've got the fainter blue areas of to the side. I combined the 2 raw images and processed in PS. There is a bit of outer red but it's quite difficult pull out without getting very noisy. The stars are looking good.

[SteveL]

Nice shot... i have an M27 sequence from my Friday night session, but the sky was brightening and the image background started to turn progresivly more blue (which confused the hell out of DSS).

[Grant]

Wow! Martin how do you do it? Thats an awesome processing job! Thanks for sharing and taking the time

[CELESCOPE]

looks like you have taken to imaging very well Grant ,another very good one

well done mate

Rog

[Kaptain Klevtsov]

Managed a quick dabble

Captain Chaos

[Grant]

How did you manage to get so much detail CC? Great reprocess!

I can tell that I need to invest as much time in capturing and learning how to capture as I do processing!

[Kaptain Klevtsov]

Just have a look at Martin's primers. Like the tiger says, they're great.

Basically cropped the good bit to cut down on the amount to be done an have a one directional gradient in the image. Next a check of the black point in all three channels seperately, then a false flat.

Curves and levels several times to get the image brighter, then a tickle of the curve in the red channel to coax out the wingtips.

False flat:-

Duplicate the layer.

Select duplicate layer to work on.

Filter - noise - dust and scratches. Adjust sliders so most of the stars disappear.

Over the big stars and target, use spot repair tool to remove the bright bits.

Filter - Blur - Gaussian, get rid of any detail thats left.

Cntrl I to invert the image.

Set opacity to 50%

Flatten image.

Reset black point in the three channels individually.

HTH

Captain Chaos

[MartinB]

That's a neat trick KK. Best of the lot is Russ Croman's gradient exterminator. This is just brilliant. You can have a free trial for a couple of weeks then it costs around £20.

http://www.rc-astro.com/resources/GradientXTerminator/index.html