Pelican Rebooted - Complete (130pds - colour)

[Uranium235]

Last night turned out to be pretty clear after a bit of a dodgy start, but the cloud went just in time for Cygnus to rise above the neighbours rooftop.

Ive topped up the Ha to 2 hours per pane and captured 45min of OIII x2, maybe not enough - but at least its some colour! Also, shooting OIII while its still pretty low gave me a couple of gradients to deal with, which normally isnt a problem - but when you have NGC7000 in the frame, Ps cannot tell the difference between nebulosity (because there is so much of it) and a gradient.

What used to be a dark patch between NGC7000 and IC5070 is now gone, its stuffed full of Ha and some nice dark features have appeared which I havent noticed before.

NGC7000 + IC5070

130pds, Atik 383L+, NEQ6, MPCC MkIII

Setpoint: -15c

Calib: Flats and Bias

Thanks for looking

Rob

First the Ha:  9x900 2x2bin

 

Next, the standard HOO format: 9x900 Ha_L, 3x900 OIII_R&B

 

Finally, the synth green version with blue pushed (pardon the halos!):

 

[Stargazer33]

Stunning amount of detail Rob! Very nice.

[PhotoGav]

Wow, simply stunning - the resolution is beautiful. Well done! I love the highlights on the wall and the back of the pelican's head.

Wasn't last night great, so wonderful to have a bit of proper dark, clear sky!

[oldpink]

fantastic set of images

[Uranium235]

Thanks

I may return to it once the nights start to lengthen again, just so I can zap that OIII gradient properly (had the same problem with the veil last year), and perhaps another hour in Ha - just to see if i can wring any more clarity out of NGC7000.

[cloudbuster]

absolutely glorious, Rob, great stuff!

[Uranium235]

Been tinkering with the colour, trying to get rid of that gradient:

[Coco]

Blimey Rob, that's flaming fantastic, rich,deep,tight stars, nice spikes, lovely colour, what doesn't it have going for it?

£165 telescope .... 

[Uranium235]

Cheers Guy!

£120 with a Baader RDF and b-mask thrown in

But ive spent twice as much getting it up to scratch!

[laser_jock99]

Glorious detail.

[Moonshane]

this falls into the category of ridiculously good.

[Uranium235]

Thanks! Im almost tempted to switch to the SW corrector for more FOV, but I think it would be foolish to mess with a settled system now. With the darkness rapidly disappearing, I need everything working when I ask it to.

[ollypenrice]

Another gem from the little reflector. I think the nebulosity is stunning but I suspect that, somewhere, the processing has thrown dark rings round the stars, albeit not severe ones. I exclude stars from any form of shapening and, indeed, sometimes put a slight blur into them when imaging narrowband widefield at shortish focal lengths.

Olly

[Landy Dave]

That is a truly amazing image

[sologuitarist61]

That image has a ridiculous amount of detail in it - brilliant stuff!

[Uranium235]

Another gem from the little reflector. I think the nebulosity is stunning but I suspect that, somewhere, the processing has thrown dark rings round the stars, albeit not severe ones. I exclude stars from any form of shapening and, indeed, sometimes put a slight blur into them when imaging narrowband widefield at shortish focal lengths.

Olly

Cheers Olly, Ive been trying to keep the dark rings down in the synth green version, but its pretty hard when im throttling the OIII to death   What I need to do is take another look at the Ha lum master, and see if there are any minor changes I can make without killing the contrast. I did exclude the stars from one sharpening routine, but I think what has happened is that a combination of layer masks,  high pass and noels enhance local contrast brought about the rings. If I could find a way to apply local contrast to everything except the stars, it should improve matters - and perhaps make the layer mask a little tighter (especially for those larger stars embedded within nebulosity).

I'll have another tinker sometime this evening.

[Uranium235]

Ive done a bit of tweaking and the stars in the Ha and HOO versions are now ok, however the synth green (blue pushed) still has one or two. The only way around it would be to get a load more OIII so I dont have to push it so hard. Ive gone in less severely with the contrast enhancement, and its helped with the noise.

Another thing I tried was to apply a slight layer mask to NGC7000, since it was brighter than IC5070 - and therefore giving a lopsided feel to the image. So thats been balanced out and I seem to have picked up extra background nebulosity (dunno how, but its there!), additionally ive been very careful with the sharpening and contrast enhancement by using layer masks to selectively apply it - that avoids applying sharpening to the dimmer portions of the nebula, which would otherwise introduce artefacts if sharpened.

Fingers crossed this will be the last of it for now   (until I get more OIII that is!)

[Epicycle]

Lovely images Rob. I'm hoping to get my 130pds back into action as soon as the weather permits,

cheers

Epicycle