VdB14 and 15, 31 hours later.

[ollypenrice]

Tom O'D and I captured this lot last week plus last night. It was the second target of the night each night using the dual Taks.

RGB 13.5 Hrs, Lum 7.5 hours, Ha 10 hours. This one's my processing.

These nebulae lie in Camelopardarlis just a little east of the Soul Nebula and could be brought into a mosaic, which might be nice. As you can guess from the exposure time they are not very bright!

Cheers,

Olly

Bigger one; http://ollypenrice.smugmug.com/Other/Best-of-Les-Granges/i-tZSKjs8/0/X3/VdB%2014%2015%20HaLRGB%2031%20Hrs-X3.jpg

[Mike Hawtin]

Wow, gorgeous, I love this kind of image and this one is a cracker, lovely subject and great colours.

Mike

[Knight of Clear Skies]

Very nice, but i was hoping for another dinosaur.

[swag72]

I like this a lot - The contrasts between the different types of nebula of blue and red is really striking.

[PhotoGav]

Another great image. How do you get such great star colour - even the brightest stars have a wonderful blue tinge of colour to them? Yes, Olly, I am jealous of your stars!

Oh, the nebulae are just sublime too....!

[ollypenrice]

Another great image. How do you get such great star colour - even the brightest stars have a wonderful blue tinge of colour to them? Yes, Olly, I am jealous of your stars!

Oh, the nebulae are just sublime too....!

Thanks. In this case I didn't do anything special for star colour, though I sometimes use Noel's Actions. The basic colour calibration was done in Pixinsight (ABE) then I used a couple of weel-known Photoshop tricsks. In Lab colour mode I increased the contrast in channels a and b. Then in RGB mode I made two copy layers, set the top one to blend mode Soft Light, flattned it down and set the second one to Blend Mode Colour.

The problem with this image was always going to be colour for the nebulae. We realized this in looking at images on the net. That's why we took such a lot of colour for this one.

OLly

[PhotoGav]

Nice little technique, I will be giving that a go. Thank you for sharing!

[Phillyo]

Wow Olly. I love those star colours! Stunning image of an area I've never seen imaged before.

Phil

[ollypenrice]

Thanks. I'm rebuilding this image from scratch because there was a fault in the stacking of one of the red sets and because I want to get the stars smaller. To be continued!

Olly

[ollypenrice]

Version 2, with which I'm a lot happier. I had a careful think about what kind of curves to use in the stretch since I couldn't get my usual star mask method to work on this. Thes stars haven't been masked at all. I just tried to use curves which kept them down as much as possible. There was also a pre-processing fault in one of the stacks which I sorted out. I'm plagued with a nasty toothache at the moment and it's playing hell with my concentration! (A new excuse on SGL??    ) Actually it's a lot better today after I added to my dentist's already considerable fortune...

Doubtless Tom will be along soon with his. It's a bit daunting processing data shared with someone who came second twice to Adam Block in international competitions last year. I hope this won't be too embarrassing!

Olly

[PhotoGav]

Yup, that works!

I hope the tooth is better very soon - there is almost nothing more debilitating than toothache...

[Guest]

Such great work you do Olly - looking at the red elements of this it reminds me of the difficulty I had processing the red in the Elephants Trunk  - do you see a similarity with this?

Again - your contributions to this and other forums is invaluable - thanks for sharing as they say these days :-)

David

[Daniel-K]

whats that column going down the left hand side?

[ollypenrice]

Such great work you do Olly - looking at the red elements of this it reminds me of the difficulty I had processing the red in the Elephants Trunk  - do you see a similarity with this?

Again - your contributions to this and other forums is invaluable - thanks for sharing as they say these days :-)

David

Adding Ha is always the problem. In this image using it as luminance (which I try not to do) would be out of the question because, although the two blue reflection nebulae do haves ome red signal, they have no Ha whatever so Ha would kill them in Lum.

Olly

[ollypenrice]

whats that column going down the left hand side?

In the second version? Is there one? In the first it came from a bad stack in which a band of red just didn't happen to find its way ino the final result. I re stacked it and thought it had gone...

Olly

[Daniel-K]

In the second version? Is there one? In the first it came from a bad stack in which a band of red just didn't happen to find its way ino the final result. I re stacked it and thought it had gone...

Olly

it seems to have been sorted in the 2nd one, I feel you have gone too dark in the 2nd one and maybe push the blue up a bit more. looks like a really  though object & dedication at 31hrs shows what it take to produce a great image

[Sp@ce_d]

Well, first off I thought "Ollys at it again.. yes usual standards.. very nice" then, as I got to the 2nd version I sat up.. it started to draw me in.  The framing of this seems quite critical to my eye. I'm leaning toward the up close and personal preferences with my imaging tastes (although I realise this is harder than it looks having failed miserably with my own attempts so far this year!). I would love to get immersed in all that blue and dust. However, I'm craving to see the bigger picture on this one. I feel like I want to see more Ha to balance the blue, I want to know the "bigger picture".. There you go Olly more sensor real estate & definitely a mosaic required

Oh.. and a nice Malt applied liberally does wonders... both with the tooth & the Dentist bill.. ....you have my sympathy.

[ollypenrice]

The Ha in this image is faint. Here we have ten hours in 30 min subs so there isn't a lot. Tonight I'm gong to take an overlapping panel to te west of this to see how it mill mosaic with the Soul nebula which we already have...

Olly

[Tom OD]

Go Olly Go. Yes this is part of a Ha region that almost reaches over to the soul. I'm really just restarting this too, but the second version here is a lot better in my opinion. The extra RGB has really helped this. The framing was really chance. We knew of the general Ha v vdb real estate in the image, but this was a second image of the night where the landscape orientation was critical, so there was not going to be any rotation of the camera for framing. A pity sometimes, but it was necessary here not to touch it. This was a new region of sky for us, so every frame off the camera had the lovely wow factor where you get to marvel at new deep space wonders. The other half of the fun is how you want it to look. Do you want you eye balanced to see both objects, or do you want one to stand out etc...

Anyway, I'd like to prescribe a cheap mans malt solution to your tooth ache. A Duvel of course!

No pressure on my version then with your much appreciated comments Olly,

[Guest]

Have you thought about getting the dentist interested in astrophotography? Might be potential for a little revenge there... Or alternatively, potential for a deal?

Zoe x

Version 2, with which I'm a lot happier. I had a careful think about what kind of curves to use in the stretch since I couldn't get my usual star mask method to work on this. Thes stars haven't been masked at all. I just tried to use curves which kept them down as much as possible. There was also a pre-processing fault in one of the stacks which I sorted out. I'm plagued with a nasty toothache at the moment and it's playing hell with my concentration! (A new excuse on SGL??    ) Actually it's a lot better today after I added to my dentist's already considerable fortune...

Doubtless Tom will be along soon with his. It's a bit daunting processing data shared with someone who came second twice to Adam Block in international competitions last year. I hope this won't be too embarrassing!

Olly

[ollypenrice]

Excellent idea, Zoe. Even dentists might be brought to a bread and water diet by embarking on this madness!!! I need a new mount. Sell the aeroplane! 

lly

[x6gas]

Oh yes - the second version is absolutely on it.  If I am completely honest I didn't think version 1 was quite up to the usual Olly standard... but heck, toothache plays havoc...

Much more appreciative of V2...

[Mukv]

WOW nothing I can say that hasn't allready been said.

you have skills many envy myself included.

from capture to screen you are up on top of the world from my point of view

 or should that be out of this world!

I have  googled yahood and binged for step by step guide for this but never

found a simplified set of instructions maybe there can't be for such a complicated

operation. however did you learn this skill where would a mere mortal such as myself

begin. at times like this seeing your work makes me feel so young ( my thirst for knowing how was at it's hight way back then )

and now I have the thirst yet again!

nice one my friend both you and Tom

Andy

[ollypenrice]

WOW nothing I can say that hasn't allready been said.

you have skills many envy myself included.

from capture to screen you are up on top of the world from my point of view

 or should that be out of this world!

I have  googled yahood and binged for step by step guide for this but never

found a simplified set of instructions maybe there can't be for such a complicated

operation. however did you learn this skill where would a mere mortal such as myself

begin. at times like this seeing your work makes me feel so young ( my thirst for knowing how was at it's hight way back then )

and now I have the thirst yet again!

nice one my friend both you and Tom

Andy

Thanks.  Like most people I just picked it all up step by step, starting with almost no IT competence - which was the hardest bit. When I started out I learned from our guests who were already imaging. Tom was about six months ahead of me on his first visit so I picked up a lot from him and from Peter Vasey, Paul Jenkins, Maurice Toet, Frans Kroon, Chris Suddell, Doug Jones, MartinB and others, many of whom are known on here.

I'd been going for a while before our internet connection improved enough to allow forum participation and then you can really draw on expert help. Sometimes just one small-seeming idea can open doors. (I remember RobH talking about not applying luminance to stars, for instance.) When you reach a certain familiarity with Ps or Pixinsight you can start to test processing ideas of your own, which is great fun.

I don't have a hard and fast workflow though I follow a predictable general direction. What makes imaging so interesting, apart from the amazement of seeing what's out there, is that every image is different. It's important to keep looking at the picture to see what it's asking for. In this one, for instance, I was struggling to keep the stars down (see version 1) so I tried a new curve, flattening it to a straightish line at the right hand edge of the histogram pedestal. For all I know people may have been doing this for years but I never had and on this image it worked. That's probably because there is only faint nebulosity here, no mid range or bright stuff.

I've just seen Tom's version and he's pulled far more out of the Ha than I have. We are embarking on a mosaic to widen this out, now.

Olly

[Gedan]

Stunning as ever!