Variations on the Wall: a tale of two newtonians

[Epicycle]

Hi,

I've working on the Wall in the North American Nebula, a wonderful region, and at the same time practicing combining images taken with

different focal lengths.

The two images below were taken with the following equipment:

-Scopes: 130pds and Skyliner 200p

-Camera: SXVR-H9

-Mount: Heq5 guided off-axis with the costar

-Baader MPCC III

-Filters: Astrodon Ha 5nm and OIII 3nm

Data:

-OIII: 15x900s with the 130pds

-Ha: 11x900s with the 130pds and 16x900s with the Skyliner

The narrow field image (Skyliner) has a resolution of roughly 1" per pixel and the wide field image (130pds) is about 2" per pixel.

I went both ways: the OIII mainly used for colour was used for both images, but then I also used the high resolution image

to increase the detail in the wide field one (I recall Olly in one his uncountable number of posts saying he does this often) and I think this worked

out quite well. I did the merging using the GradientMergeMosaic tool in PI and the registration was all done using the StarAlignment tool in PI.

The processing was done mostly in PI with some touches of PS for high pass filter and selective colour.

I'm quite happy with the way these Newtonians perform, for the price they are unbeatable! I have not done anything elaborate for

the 130pds except add an extra thumb screw in the focuser to avoid tilt. The focuser gets in the way of the light path and stars come out

"chopped", but I found a cool way to amend this to some degree in post processing using a star field generated by CatalogStarGenerator in PI.

As always, comments and feedback welcome and thanks for looking.

Details on astrobin for both images:

and

cheers

Epicycle

[laser_jock99]

Awsome images.

[Daniel-K]

 great jobI really like these,but  i see in the wall II there is some green. maybe run HLGV or something to get rid of it. great job though and your stars look super sometimes seeing image like this make me miss my AP days

[Stargazer33]

They are truly beautiful images. Very nice!

[Epicycle]

Thanks for feedback!

Daniel: good point, I'll check the green

cheers

E.

[Martin-Devon]

Great images, striking blue hues, very impressive. I like the tight round stars with no halos also. 

[Epicycle]

Thanks Martin!

[Uranium235]

Another 130pds blockbuster!

Just trying to get my head around how you managed to get that colour scheme with only Ha and OIII   confused dotcom

[Epicycle]

Thanks Rob! I didn't do anything too strange with the colours, I created a synthetic green roughly a la Cannistra, mapped Ha to Red and OIII to blue and then manipulated the image with selective colour until I got something

I liked.

E.

[bobmoss]

Fantastic images!

[Elio]

Good image! 

[Uranium235]

Thanks Rob! I didn't do anything too strange with the colours, I created a synthetic green roughly a la Cannistra, mapped Ha to Red and OIII to blue and then manipulated the image with selective colour until I got something

I liked.

E.

Ahhh Cannistra.... that explains all, cheers!

[Epicycle]

Fantastic images!

  

Good image!

Thank you!

E.

[Epicycle]

Ahhh Cannistra.... that explains all, cheers!

I'm planning to get the SII and then compare.... But clear nights are so rare I may postpone this and move on.

E.

[swag72]

A pair of very striking images indeed

[Epicycle]

Thanks Sara!