Pelican nebula and horsehead revisited

[GordonH]

Hi

Managed to get out on Monday night and do some more imaging, it was absolutely freezing but these are the best of the shots for the evening as some misty cloud cut the imaging time for other shots.

The first shot is of the Pelican nebula taken with Starlight Xpress M8C binned 2x2 with 0.8 FR on WO 66 piggy backed on C14 on a paramount ME, 30 x 4 minutes unguided

The horsehead and flame nebula are the same except only 25 subframes were usable as Orion was starting to go lower in the sky and a neighbours twig on a tree was producing some very strange difraction spikes on Alnitak

Although the M8C is a one shot colour camera I am really struggling with the RGB colour conversion in Maxim DL with the settings and I only seem to get a single colour cast on the whole of the image (colour image enclosed). I must admit I am doing all the process by trial and error as I haven't gone through my Adam Block DVD's yet. I posted an image of the horse head and flame a few weeks ago but I think this one has got much better detail in it due to extra exposure time. Any tips on colour extraction for M8C would be most welcome.

Lucky the dew heater worked on the WO 66 because by the time I finished at 5am the C14 was covered by a thin coating of frost (glad I left the lens cover on)

Regards

Gordon

[trudie]

Hi Gordon,

They are terrific images, I think I like the colour Horsehead best, great stuff.

Trudie

[MartinB]

Can't see the cast on my crappy work monitor gordon. If you have any sky glow you will get a cast. Easy to deal with though in PS - when adjusting the black point in levels do each colour channel seperately. Move the left hand slider over to the point where the histogram starts to climb rapidly. That should sort things out if alternated with curves (no needs to do seperate curves for each channel) The horse head looks good and pretty dramatic.

[GordonH]

Thanks Martin

That's one of the things I like about this forum, it doesn't matter how experienced or inexperienced you are everybody is willing to share tips and help each other. As they say you start on the bottom of the ladder and work your way up one rung at a time.

Merry Christmas to all

Gordon