Trinkets in the sky

[Martin-Devon]

It's not often I image a star field, and previously I'd overlooked M45 - however there have recently been some excellent posts of this target on the forum so I decided to have a bash at this. Taken a few days ago, excellent conditions, no moonlight & managed to get 16x5min Lum and 12x5min each for RGB.

It's a lovely target to image, encompassing a beautiful star cluster which looks like jewels in the sky, then as you go deeper with the subs & data you pull out the lovely wisps of nebulosity around the core stars and the reddish-tint on one side to complement the blues. If time permits I'll go back & take more data, it'll need another moon-less night though.

Martin

[nephilim]

Beautiful pic!! I've just bought Steve Richards, 'Making every photn count', so, maybe one day........

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Stunning. I do not think I have seen a better rendition of all the detail in the reflection nebulae.

[adamsp123]

Oooh Very Nice

[RAC]

yep really nice thats for sure!

[Tom2012]

That's a brilliant image! Love the detail. To think that that is actually going on up there right now!

Well done!

Tom.

[chrisfellows]

Wow, such vibrancy in this image.

Well done!

Chris

[Gina]

Beautiful - like ice crystals on glass - what a marvellous image

[jnc71106]

thats very nice martin

[Mark72]

Beautiful work Martin,

Very impressive!

Mark

[Martin-Devon]

Thanks for all the feedback - M45 is indeed a lovely target, visible with the naked eye, impressive through binoculars & spectacular when imaged....

[SJJ]

Great image...

[Raga]

Fantastic image. Loads of dust captured there. Well done

[swag72]

You have certainly captured a great deal of dust, which I think you've processed really well. Did you put into practice your skills learnt at the imaging course? Just one thing though, I am surprised that you have the halo's that you do as I guess this was taken with the Tak? If I'm honest. these spoil it for me a little. I can't offer any processing tips though, as I'm sure this would be my nemesis, so much so that I'd not even try to image it!!

[TakMan]

Very nice Martin - it goes deep for fairly short exposures and focus looks 'sharp as a razor!'...

With regards to halos - was this with the reducer or at the Tak's native focal length?

Clear skies,

Damian

[Martin-Devon]

Thanks for the additional feedback - admittedly there's still plenty of scope for improvement!

Sara - the halos are indeed challenging to deal with. One of my issues is that I do so little LRGB imaging and one of my goals for next year is to work on my star control. For M45 it's a worst case scenario, it's like having a dozen Alnitaks in the image to deal with! I probably should have run a series of 15-30 second subs to get much reduced size & saturation for the big stars, I think this would have eliminated most of the halos as well, these would then need to be blended into the 5 min subs; this is one of the ways that M42, with Alnitak, is handled. The other way is to process the halos out - probably doable, but not within my remit of Photoshop skills at the moment.

Damian - this image was taken with the reducer in the Tak, so the F ratio was 3.6, and as you probably know from your similar set-up, under these very fast conditions just 0.1mm or less of focus adjustment makes all the difference between being in/out of focus.