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In the wake of the Pleiades...

ollypenrice

By ollypenrice
in Imaging - Deep Sky

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Uranium235

Uranium235

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Looks great Olly. I've always felt M45 looks better in a slightly widefield context. It allows for much better contrast between the empty/dusty regions.

I might have another go at this one (despite having no RGB filters!).... another mosaic? maybe :D

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Owmuchonomy

Owmuchonomy

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Years ago in one of my first astronomy books I read that this cluster is now known to be ploughing through some interstellar gas and dust - and the book (now lost) had a picture showing the streaming 'wake' behind the stars as proof. Trying to bring this evidence of motion out in my own picture has become an obsession so whenever guests want to image the region I add new data to what I already have and push it even harder in processing. A couple of nights ago with SGL member Sandancer we captured a further 6.5 hours or so in the dual rig. Great! 

My limited knowledge is that M45 is going to end up at Orion's feet before being 'kicked into touch' away from the Orion system as we see it.  In Olly's amazing picture this means relative movement (as of now) in the 4 o'clock direction i think.  Now I get a real sense of movement. Stunning.

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ollypenrice

ollypenrice

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Olly, is this LRGB?

It is, Gav. It also includes some OSC data from when I had that version of the Atik 4000.

Fantastic image olly, do you mind if I use it for some outreach im running at scouts?

Of course, Jim, please help yourself. My pleasure. If ever you'd like a Hi Res JPEG sending via email just PM me.

Olly

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MattJenko

MattJenko

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Stars look great. Not blown out or with overbright halos as many renditions of M45 show.

and therein lies a question. Olly - how did you manage to avoid the halos - is it purely down to the equipment used, or is it something you did as part of the light gathering or processing?

Thanks

Matt

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ollypenrice

ollypenrice

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and therein lies a question. Olly - how did you manage to avoid the halos - is it purely down to the equipment used, or is it something you did as part of the light gathering or processing?

Thanks

Matt

The scopes that have contributed data to this image are: Tak FSQ85, 2xTak FSQ106 and TEC 140. Filters are all Baader LRGB when used, plus the filter matrix on the OSC Atik 4000 which threw in a few hours. At no point have I had any haloes to deal with and they are not all that common on M45 images, though I have seen them on occasion. The OSC did throw up one minor artefact from its matrix and this I've seen on other images taken with it. It sometimes gave a kind of short thin diff spike through the odd bright star.

I think that a far bigger problem is that one stretch will never fit all on this target. A stretch hard enough to pull out the nebulosity will take the bright stars well into the white clipped zone. However, 7x15 minutes in a Luminance filter at F5 does not give disastrous stellar cores. The first image below is the linear stack of that data. It is possible, then, to keep the stellar cores down to this size by using different stretches for the cores than for the main image. Sure, I'd like them smaller but already this wouldn't be the end of the world;

LUM%20T%207X15-M.jpg

However, there's a better idea. For the stellar cores don't use the luminance, use only the RGB. Here we have the linear RGB data from 18x10 mins all in. Here I've extracted the synthetic luminance with a view to giving it a soft stretch for the cores and blending with the real luminance above. The stellar cores are much smaller and so it makes more sense to build the stars from this stack.

SYN%20LUM%20T%20120MNS-M.jpg

As and aside, this is why I always insist that LRGB is faster than one shot colour. One shot colour is RGB by another name. The lower image (RGB) has 180 minutes of data while the one above (Luminance) has only 105 minutes. Obviously the luminance has gone far deeper, though.

The curve I use for stellar core layers is something like this;

starfield%20stretch-M.jpg

(This isn't M45, it's the demo image I use on courses.)

Olly

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Gina

Gina

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I have no doubt that I could get much better images out of my image data if I had Olly's processing experience :)  Thank you Olly for imparting some of that vast knowledge :)

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Sandancer10

Sandancer10

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Hi Olly, this is even more beautiful than when you were going through the tutorial with me. I have a copy of the same data, but shudder to think what my feeble effort will be in comparison. I will however 'give it a go' and see what I can do.

It was great being at your place last week and the seeing was unbelievable - the food and wine was excellent too. I had a good journey back and called into Sistron on the way to Marseille, it was lovely and I got quite a few terrestrial photo's. Please say hello to Monique for me.

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