Auriga widefield

[george7378]

Hi everyone,

Here's a shot I took tonight - a widefield photo of Auriga with Jupiter and the Pleiades in there too. It's a single 30 second shot @ ISO1600 f/3.5 with my 1100D. I took 5 dark frames too, but they hardly made a difference. It was shot in JPG (maybe I should have used RAW?) and it's completely unedited. I'm quite pleased with it, but I've seen better widefields in my time. How would you recommend I process it to get it to look best?

Thanks a lot for looking!

[JamesF]

Took me a while to pick Auriga out Always tricky when you don't know what orientation everything is in. I'd go for more lights -- perhaps twenty or so, and stack them (with the darks) using DSS. And use RAW images.

There seems to be a fair bit of a gradient concentrated on the centre and lower middle of the frame. I think getting rid of that would be the first priority as it makes a mess when the histogram is stretched. Not sure if that's easily possible though. Do you have any light pollution? It looks like that kind of colour, in which case an LP filter might help.

James

[Cloudwatcher]

Earlier today I was reading The Universe According to Patrick Moore in the Jan. issue of Sky at Night. He refers to Auriga as sitting in a rich star field due to one of our Galaxy's spiral arms running across this constellation. I was reminded of seeing your image on the Forum and thought I'd take a closer look. Couldn't find it at first.............things move so fast on SGL...... but finally tracked it down here in 'widefield'.

I think the gradient concentration referred to by JamesF might in fact be the spiral arm mentioned above. A check on Starry Night Pro seems to confirm this........see attached screen shot. This compares well with your image once the red background is reduced.

Good capture.

[george7378]

Hi Cloudwatcher,

Thanks for reading into it - yeah, I thought it might have been the milky way too. When I compare the location of the dark spots in the milky way they seem to match up too. I also noticed M34 in the upper right after seeing the Starry Night screenshot, so thanks for sharing I just wish I could get rid of the orange glow on the image! It's probably light pollution.

Thanks again