Orions Sword...

[MarsG76]

Hi All,

I was lucky enough to have one clear night in between cloudy and rainy weather. It happened to be a moonless night, so between 9pm and just past midnight I grabbed the final subs I needed to finish the NGC1365 barred spiral image (still to be finished-processed) and after those subs were done I wanted to start to image the whole of Orions Sword using my 80mm f6.25 refractor.

I captured an hour of 210 second subs, an hour of 180 second subs, 30 mins of 30 second subs and 15 minutes of 15 second subs all on the full spectrum modded Canon 40D at ISO800.

For the final processing I selected only the best subs, and thankfully most were near perfect (for my average standards), resulting in me only throwing away a total of 15 minutes of data.

The next night I get a another imaging session at Orions Sword (hopefully still when the moon is not lighting things up), I'll grab a stack of Halpha and OIII data to add to this project. I'm curious what the narrowband added to this RGB will result in.

Clear skies,

MG

[Starlight 1]

Love the color in Orion , may be just me but the runing man color look low !!!! for all that data , so I give 10/10 very nice.

[xtreemchaos]

great image MG, love the colours and detail. well done.  thanks for sharing  charl.

[callisto]

What a beautiful image, well done 

Mark

[nameunknown]

Brilliant! Not that many years ago, pro-Astronomers would have been hard-pressed to get images of this quality, and they would have been in black and white.

P

[Starlight 1]

Just having a look on the Mac computer the running man have much more colour but the stars look very purple , it's still better than anything I can produce. Is this is probably where a star mask would help. Just my opinion don't be offended by my comments it's a great picture and you should be proud of it.

[MarsG76]

Thank you for all the feedback... I greatly appreciate it.

Love the color in Orion , may be just me but the runing man color look low !!!! for all that data , so I give 10/10 very nice.

I agree that the running man seems a bit low... I reprocessed the image, concentrating on the running man and the stars... I didn't want to stretch it so much that it starts to look over cooked. I attached an image with the running man brightened up a bit where I don't think it looks too over done. Perhaps the Running man Nebula needs a bit more exposure time per subs on the 80mm frac.

Just having a look on the Mac computer the running man have much more colour but the stars look very purple , it's still better than anything I can produce. Is this is probably where a star mask would help. Just my opinion don't be offended by my comments it's a great picture and you should be proud of it.

No I'm not offended at all, I actually appreciate feedback by others who might pick up what I miss allowing me to improve my images.

I had a more critical look at the stars and they did look too crunchy and saturated, so I reprocessed the image with paying more attention to the crunchiness and color of the stars... Even though the stars still have a purplish hue to them, it is not as intense or rough as it was in the first version... I think that is, at the least, caused by the frac being a doublet generating chromatic aberrations.

Let me know what you think of the reprocess, whether you judge it to be a improvement.

Now to wait for another clear sky to capture some narrowband data to add to the project...

Clear skies...

MG

[Starlight 1]

How can you make a great picture better but somehow you have ,L is a lot stronger round the running man Bring out the colours much more.

As I said I had no intentions to criticise other peoples work its something I keep trying to do and Fail at the first hurdle, so thank you for your reply  Is much better then standing me against a wall with a cigarette and a blindfold.

[xtreemchaos]

you have nailed it MG, well done mate,very pleasing to the eye. clear skys charl.

[laudropb]

Very nice image. You have really nailed it. Thanks for posting.

[ollypenrice]

I really like many aspects of this, espeically the main nebula, but the star colour is quite a long way out for some reason. You're getting a very magenta result on some stars. Could this be the mod to the camera lifting the reds too high and turning the blues magenta? Lowering the saturation doesn't alter the colour balance which is where the problem lies. Or maybe a combination of the mod and a tendency to blue bloat from the optics? It could be fixed in Ps Layers.

A suggestion on your short exposures: the shorter they are the fewer you need of them in the case of M42. The S/N ratio around the Trapezium is so good because of the brightness that you'd only need a dozen 15 sec subs to kill off the noise. I'd shoot more of the 30 second ones but still not more than 25, then I'd devote more of the time to the long ones which are in search of the faint stuff and its poor S/N ratio.

This is a great tutorial on combining multiple sub lengths. http://www.astropix.com/HTML/J_DIGIT/LAYMASK.HTM

Olly

[MarsG76]

I really like many aspects of this, espeically the main nebula, but the star colour is quite a long way out for some reason. You're getting a very magenta result on some stars. Could this be the mod to the camera lifting the reds too high and turning the blues magenta? Lowering the saturation doesn't alter the colour balance which is where the problem lies. Or maybe a combination of the mod and a tendency to blue bloat from the optics? It could be fixed in Ps Layers.

A suggestion on your short exposures: the shorter they are the fewer you need of them in the case of M42. The S/N ratio around the Trapezium is so good because of the brightness that you'd only need a dozen 15 sec subs to kill off the noise. I'd shoot more of the 30 second ones but still not more than 25, then I'd devote more of the time to the long ones which are in search of the faint stuff and its poor S/N ratio.

This is a great tutorial on combining multiple sub lengths. http://www.astropix.com/HTML/J_DIGIT/LAYMASK.HTM

Olly

Hi Olly,

I'd say it's probably more the chromatic aberrations on the optics, but you might be onto something with the modded camera pulling the blue halos toward the red spectrum.

Once I get my Halpha and OIII data I'll pay more attention to the star colors and bring them down to more of a natural color.

Thanks for the link. The plan was for me to get a stack of 20-30minute low ISO subs for the halpha component in the nebulosity and 15 minute OIII subs to perhaps enhance the running man nebula and the blue aspect of the whole image. Using the 40D capturing through OIII filter kills 2 birds with one stone since there is plenty of data in the green and blue channels.