Barnard 72 The Snake

[juliangeorgeshaw]

This is my first substantive SGL post but I have been lurking for years. In that time I have acquired a huge amount of helpful information from SGL by reading posts from Olly Penrice, Harry Page, Steve Richards, Sara Wager and many others, thank you. So it's about time I posted myself.

I am a graduate of the Olly Penrice College of off-the-deep-end Astro Imaging. Seriously I don't think there is a better way to get started than to take your gear to Olly's place. (Olly is also good for astronomy theory, for a small amount extra we got 5x2hour sessions on modern astronomy which kept the attention of the whole family, Olly is a gifted teacher).

This image of The Snake was inspired by an image of the same object posted by Olly some time ago. Olly was shooting through the muck on the horizon but I had no such excuse. I packed my Tak Baby Q and an HEQ5 into 2 suitcases and went to New Zealand where The Snake was high in the sky (though there are no snakes actually in New Zealand). John Drummond very kindly let me set up my gear at his Possum Observatory near Gisborne.

http://www.possumobservatory.co.nz/

But I forgot to swith on the Atik 450's cooler!! Fortunately it was cool anyway (10-15 deg C) and the 460 is low noise...

Full resolution:

http://www.astrobin.com/203886/

I processed it by muddling through PixInsight with the help of Harry's videos (not that he is to blame for the result!). I can't remember what I did but if I couldn't manage to get a process to improve the result I just backed it out.

All comments welcome, especially critical ones.

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Lovely image!

[xtreemchaos]

nice first post mate,well done. thanks for sharing. charl

[laudropb]

Very nice image and a very nice post. Thanks for that.

[ollypenrice]

Hey, Julian, great to see you post an image - and a good one to boot! And thanks for your approval of our efforts here.

I like it (the image, that is.)

There are a few things I'd do a little differently. In this kind of target you have stars (lots of them and they are very bright and bent on taking over the entire image) and dusty features which are absurdly dark and need stretching like mad. In short you have conflicting requirements. Soft stretch for the stars, hard stretch for the dust. There are as many ways to deal with this are there are ways of falling down stairs but my approach would be in Curves, probably. I'd be looking to shape a curve which rose steeply at the bottom (to lift the dust) and flattened early (to hold down the stars.) You could also stretch under a star mask, at least initially.

But you're up and posting and you started with something rather difficult, NZ notwithstanding. Chapeau!

Olly

[cloudnine]

That's lovely. Thanks for posting.

[swag72]

Talk about jumping in at the deep end! I always find this an interesting image and I think you have done rather well here. I do agree with Olly about the stars, I do find them too much and in your face. They need a very gentle tickle rather than a hard push and then they will help accentuate the snake rather than overwhelm it.

A good try for sure and you have star colour too, which is always a tricky one Well done indeed