Northern Ireland Widefield 1

[gaelicstorm7]

Hi guys,

Just a quick word on what happened on my recent Ireland trip, I only managed one session of clear sky on the 5th of October I was able to image from about 10pm till midnight before clouds rolled in and spoiled the party.

It's been ages since I've been out imaging so had a few initial glitches getting the EQ5 set up, but eventually was able to take some semi sucessful (hopefully) widefield images, the dew heaters proved to be a great investment as the dew was very heavy, the mount and camera were dripping with moisture after only 15 minutes. The views were stunning, the milky way was very clearly visible, M31 stood out as a bright smudge and M45 looked stunning !, just a shame I only got the couple of hours out of the whole week.

I took a set of 3 images of the Cygnus region all at 800asa f5.6 with the 17-40mm f4'L' lens on the 350D at 300,480 and 600 seconds exposures which by my calculations gives about 23 minutes of total exposure I've stacked em as best I can in registax but am not sure how good a job I've done as there doesn't look to be as much detal in the stacked sequence as there is in the individual frames.

As for processing the image in photoshop I'm not having alot of success, so if anyone wants to have a stab at it for me I'd be most gratefull. Here's a resized version of the stacked file, if anyone would like the full size one (or the individual files) to have a play with drop me a PM with your email addresss and I'll send it over.

Other stuff I've still got to work with are widefields of the M31 area, M45, North American Nebula and some star trail images.

Cheers,

Alan

[SteveL]

Just had a play, not sure about my colour balance...

Try Deep Sky Stacker instead of registax....

[gaelicstorm7]

Thats stunning Steve, much better than my efforts, was that processed in Deep sky stacker ?

Thanks

Alan

[SteveL]

no, that was just your posted jpg version tweaked in PSCS2. DSS just stacks and spits out an image that you then need to post process elsewhere... but its free

i find registax just makes a mess of deepsky stuff (I only use it for planetary work), but thats could be just me

[gaelicstorm7]

Right, thanks for that, I'm just downloading deep sky tracker as I type, will try stacking the frames in it and see if it looks better than registax, any chance of telling me what you did in photoshop to get the result you did ?

Thanks

Alan

[SteveL]

Now thats a very good question.... most of the time, I just "fiddle" and do things without really remembering what I have done. On this one, it was probably

Levels

Gradient removal (Gradient XTerminator - great plugin for PSCS!)

Some more Levels

Curves

Colour balance

Contrast

or something like that

[Kaptain Klevtsov]

I had a play with the full size version but couldn't get anything as good as Steve did. Looks like I'll have to get gradient exterminator if I want to do anything serious with the DSLR in future.

Kaptain Klevtsov

[Gordon G]

Nice Pic Alan, and very nice edit as well.

Hope you had a good time Alan !

Gordon