Orion and Plieades 24th Jan 2012

[tibbs1972]

Caught a shot of the Soutern Sky tonight over the village.

Makes a change to have clear skies all around the house.

[evilgeenius]

Nice shot. how long was the exposure?

[MikeWilson]

Lovely shot. I hope you don't mind - I edited it in Photoshop to see if I could remove the sky and light pollution gradient and increase the contrast in the stars.

[tibbs1972]

Lovely shot. I hope you don't mind - I edited it in Photoshop to see if I could remove the sky and light pollution gradient and increase the contrast in the stars.

[ATTACH]78033[/ATTACH]

Not a problem. I don't have any good software yet to do this.

I'll get round to it eventually.

[tibbs1972]

Nice shot. how long was the exposure?

Thanks

I set my Camera to a 30sec exposure for the shot, the maximum without using my laptop.

I suppose I could have setup up my scopes tripod to track for a few minutes, but I wanted to take advantage of the clear skies before the clouds rolled in.

[Simms]

Title should read -

Orion, Pleides AND Hyades clusters + Sirius! (Hyades being the V between Orion and M45) - nice for 30 secs and lots going on in there! (and maybe even a hint of the Xmas Tree cluster as well?)

[tibbs1972]

I stand corrected, I've still got a lot to learn. I've only been at it a year.

[Simms]

I stand corrected, I've still got a lot to learn. I've only been at it a year.

Sorry mate, wasnt trying to correct you at all - its just that area of sky has so much going on in it - I know I left out a lot - for example, the horsehead, the flame, numerous smaller clusters - you just managed to capture a hell of a lot in a single shot. Sorry if I came across as a bit arrogant/condescending, that wasn`t my intention at all!

[Kowspot]

Awesome shot! I took the liberty of touching up the photo up. Just reduced the reds and upped the contrast up a little bit in PhotoShop. I love this pic!

[tibbs1972]

Thanks for your comments.

No problem with the improvement, looks great.

Never thought I'd get a shot like that above my house.

[the milster]

Great shot. I love looking at these widefield shots and trying to see what I can pick out, good way for me to try and learn the sky a bit while it's cloudy.

[the milster]

he two bright stars at the top left, are they the head stars of Gemini?

[Zul]

Nice shot!

[MikeWilson]

he two bright stars at the top left, are they the head stars of Gemini?

Comparing them to the relative position of other stars in Stellarium, I don't think so.

Gemini is certainly there, but it's more of a foot than a head.

[evilgeenius]

I think I prefer your original photo Neil, looks the most natural and soothing.

[MikeWilson]

Awesome shot! I took the liberty of touching up the photo up. Just reduced the reds and upped the contrast up a little bit in PhotoShop. I love this pic!

I like your edit the best :-)

[gdheib0430]

I bleive you also got Sirius just above the roof as well...super bright star looks great I really like the look.

[Kowspot]

I like your edit the best :-)

Why thank you I didn't see that you edited it too! I feel silly now Just need practice so messing around with everyones pics lately haha. Thanks for the compliment tho

[tibbs1972]

Thanks for the comments everyone, normally my images don't draw so much attention, as I'm still a novice.

Maybe a thread for raw images could be started for fellow Astronomers to play around with. I certainly don't mind any attempts at improving the images I've taken.

[tibbs1972]

I've been playing around with Microsoft ICE.

It's really easy to make a mosaic with it. I Just had a go at stitching a second image to the origional photo in this thread to widen the final image.

[Doug]

Hi Neil

I really like this sort of image ,Sirus looks very bright in this image little be more to the left you would have got Mars in as well :-)

[tibbs1972]

Hi Doug,

I might have to try a different viewing site to get more in.

I've got an idea to try a full 360 panarama, but I can't do it from my location, as there is a factory a mile to the north of my house, which is like a small city 24/7.

[the milster]

Hi Tibbs, have you tried a free piece of software called Gimp, it's what I would describe as a Photoshop lite, I used to use it a bit for photos (not astronomy) before I had Lightroom. Might be worth a look for playing around with.

[tibbs1972]

Hi Milster,

Thanks for the tip, I'll have a look into it.

[tibbs1972]

I've just spent 40mins running the images through deep sky stacker and recreating the mosaic.

Seems to have removed some of the noise and allowed me to get some colour from some of the stars.

Unfortunately, the colour is lost as the file size is reduced for upload.