Baby steps for the Eagle

[Jessun]

Hello,

Another run with the Skywatcher 120.

The Eagle is a remarkable target when done well, and whilst that is not something I can claim, I keep returning to it out of sheer fascination, and I was really curious to see if the 120 could bring out anything from it combined with the trusty ol' M25 OSC.

I've tried to resist blowing it to bits, and I think I'm doing small steps in improving processing. Well you can be the judges of that. PS CS5 processing by the way.

It's a mere 2 hours and 52 minutes - 43 subs, and down below is a comparison with last years Eagle taken with the 8"RC at f8, well over 6 hours, and almost twice the number of subs that time.

Needless to say I'd give a kingdom for a mono, and a Ha filter!

Thanks for looking!

/Jesper

Old left, new right:

[ollypenrice]

Seriously clean and well and truly in focus. This cries out for narrowband. There is not all that much star colour, though. Do we know why?

Ollly

[perfrej]

Not bad! I like the fact that it is clean and smooth with a 3D feeling. Stars are probably just too stretched to show much color...

/p

[Stargazer33]

Baby is taking BIG steps! They are very nice captures. Lovely and sharp.

[Jessun]

Eagle eyed observers, thanks for your input.

I though I might just get away with the stars... The nebula sits low in an unfavourable az - right over the industries along the river Rhone. Red seems to be able to push through that mess better. I usually do a star layer with the dust and scratches method, and a little saturation boost lifts them out - and I keep the stars in a layer early in the stretching to come back to. For some reason I didn't manage to do that trick this time. The selection kept coming up assymetrical within each star... Mysterious.

I read an article in a magazine involving using a gaussian blur on the stars do drag edge colour into the core, and that looked interesting too.

As always I hope to add a night's worth on this and I'll try to attack those stars.

Thanks again,

/Jesper

[ollypenrice]

You could make a copy layer, blur and increase saturation of the bottom layer, then select just the stellar cores on the top layer and erase them.

Noel has an excellent Action for increasing star colour, too.

Olly

[Jessun]

A most welcome tip Olly !

/Jesper

[Jessun]

I added another night to my Eagle, short as they are...

This is now 5 hours and 20 minutes with the ED120 working at f6.4, and whilst I don't seem to be able to get interesting star colours, I think other areas look a bit more vivid despite imaging through chimney smoke .

Thanks for looking!

/Jesper

[steppenwolf]

I rather like both the original and this image - you've got plenty of detail without the usual bloated stars that often accompany images of this object. Really good star colour doesn't come easily around this object for some reason.

[Jessun]

"I just don't know what to do with myself"..... The old song echoes in my head as I go around in circles with processing the Eagle...

I added some more time the other night and have now 8 hours and 16 minutes. Still the SW120 of course.

I threw some new weapons at this bird, including some cheeky wavelet work in Pixinsight, but I don't really know what I think anymore. Over cooked?

Thanks for looking and do pipe up with any comment.

/Jesper