Cats Paw and Lobster Nebula

[Tom OD]

Hi SGL, Its been ages since I posted a pic. I have finished my imaging in Spain after nearly 3 years, but I have a new astro project on the horizon. Before I left I wanted to try this object. It reached a max. of 17 degrees, but I still managed to get something out of it. 6 hours RGB and 4 Ha. There is some green and blue flaring artifacts from the bright star pair at the tail of Scorpius. I have no extra data to cover this, and later i'll try and remove it in PS or PI somehow. I have failed on previous occasions to do that, and instead shot more data to mask the problem. So here is my first draft lets say.FSQ106N and Atik 11000 7nm Ha filter. Or you can see it on my flickr page here http://www.flickr.co...N02/9116360130/ Tom

[Mark72]

Great work Tom,

Do not see flare here, rarely imaged nice pair; thanks for sharing.

Mark

[Martin-Devon]

Superb image Tom, I really like the way you've framed & processed these two objects.

[Spoon]

wow thats amazing!

[Gina]

Very nice

[Epicycle]

That's a wonderful shot!

[Tom OD]

Thanks for the comments, I was just able to squeeze them onto the chip, whereas I would prefer a little more room at the top. Mark take a look maybe at the bigger flickr image. To the left of the cats paw you can see arcs of flaring. In my Rho mosaic I needed another frame to cover the same problem from Antares, which was flaring into panels which were close by. Maybe a baffling issue in the tube? I was unable to remove them before in PS, just too much for the clone stamp to take care of.

[fwm891]

Great image Tom.

Tom Tried to 'patch' your flare in PS. Duplicated the layer, made a selection around the flare taking in some surrounding background, inverted the selection and removed everything else other than the rectangle around the flare from the dupe layer.

With the eye dropper took a sample colour from the unflared background. Then with the magic wand selected the background and select/similar to include all the background area in the dupe layer and pasted in the foreground colour. Turned off the selection and then using an adjustment layer with clipping mask used the colour balance to match the dupe layer to the main image. Then used a brush eraser to gently blend the dupe layer to the main image and flattened.

Hope that makes sense?

Francis

[Tom OD]

I'm going to have to read this again in a few mins, but that looks like a great result. I understood what you did I'll give it a go myself on the full TIFF res. Thanks Tom

[x6gas]

Really nice image Tom. Thanks for sharing.

[fwm891]

I'm going to have to read this again in a few mins, but that looks like a great result. I understood what you did I'll give it a go myself on the full TIFF res. Thanks Tom

'You understood what I did'

[Tom OD]

Hi Francis, yes I understood you, but as I always do, I started off doing a layer copy not a duplicate layer, so that slowed me down a bit. yes it worked thanks for the steps, I did it roughly to start now I'll do it again more accurately. Tom.

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Very nice work Tom

[Dangerous-Dave]

Lovely shot, I caught the cat paw in a widefield from SW France the other year, but it was a real horizon scraper.