Between the Pleiades and Mirfalk

[wimvb]

Yesterday I we were blessed with a cloudless evening.

http://stargazerslounge.com/topic/257960-i-must-have-died-and-gone-to-heaven/

Here is my first (intermediate) result of the evening.

I struggled with stacking, until I figured out today that my master bias was debayered and used on RAW data.

Image details:

Unmodded Pentax K20D with kit lens at 35 mm f/4 ISO 1600

11 * 300 secs subs

master bias

master flat (20 subs)

no darks yet (am shooting them now with the camera in the fridge  )

Processed using PixInsight:

noise reduction and LRGB combination using the red channel as L in order to enhance the California Nebula.

The jpeg lost some colour information, but the main target came out quite clear, considering the camera I used.

Stacking introduced some "noise trails", which I hope to eliminate with dark frames.

Suggestions for improvements are (as always) appreciated.

[wimvb]

After some more tweaking in PI I got rid off most of the annoying noise. I used cosmetic correction on my RAW light frames before calibration and integration as the noise was caused by numerous "warm" pixels.

Also managed to tame the bright background at the bottom by more careful background extraction.

Used the red channel as luminance in LRGB combination to enhance the nebula.

[phil125]

Very nice image. I think the first looks better with darker background (although I know some detail may have been lost uploading, so I could be wrong). Is the noise at the bottom light pollution?

[laudropb]

Both are very nice.

[wimvb]

Yes, the red glow at the bottom is from reflected light. M45 was just clear of trees. I could only get 12 frames before tree tops started getting into the images at the bottom right. The dark area is due to trees in the last few frames. Pixinsights Background Extraction couldn't eliminate this completely. I cropped the second image more.

I will probably get back to this image and try to enhance the blue nebulosity of M45.

What pleases me most about this image are that I managed to capture the California nebula with an unmodded camera and kit lens, plus that I figured out how to get rid of the noise which was "introduced" by the stacking process.