Cepheus to Cygnus

[Knight of Clear Skies]

Took my 50mm lens out for another test run last night. My main objective was to try and capture some cleaner data to practise processing on as I suspect at least some of the issues I'm having are due to LP. So I decided to target the area between Cepheus and Cygnus, as it was at a high altitude and well placed away from my local light domes. Had another enjoyable session, although once again dew prevented me from getting the hour of data I was aiming for.

19 x 2 min subs (38 minutes total), 10 darks, 20 dark bias, no flats. Stacked and stretched in DSS, tweaked and sharpened a little in PS and DPP.

The bright star at top left is Alderamin, with the Garnet star below and to the right of it (although in my image it's more weak orange squash than resplendent gemstone). The Elephant's Trunk is also in there somewhere, if anyone could point it out that would be great.

Once again I'm having trouble getting much colour out of my images, star colour and Ha regions are showing up better in my subs than the stacked image so I clearly have some tricks to learn. Here's a stab at a more colourful version, preserving more of the original balance.

Hope you like them, any feedback or suggestions would be welcome.

[Davey-T]

I think colour perception is in the eye of the beholder to some extent, what you have is a picture of white stars and black dust lanes so essentially a B&W picture. Had a quick muck about in PS but basically you can alter the colour cast but that's it. Only did the right hand side so you can see the difference.

Did you align the histogram in DSS ? haven't used it for a whlie, think that's the only thing I did before moving the image to PS.

Dave

[Knight of Clear Skies]

Nice job improving the colour balance and bringing out the star colours.

On the first image I aligned the histogram peaks in DSS, then tried increasing the saturation to bring out the colours, but I couldn't add much sat before it started looking odd, hence the almost monochrome result.

I've ditched the overly-purple version now. It was a an experiment with deliberately misaligning the channels, using the histogram in the original subs as a guide.

[Davey-T]

Always used to get virtually b&w pics out of DSS never bothered doing anything in it after stacking except aligning histogram.

Dave