Pleiades short run

[Guest]

This is a run we captured yesterday night during an unexpectedly clear sky. It only consists of 3 hours of data so far, in 5 minute subs. It was taken with the Atik 460EX, through the Takahashi FSQ85 with reducer, and was processed in Pixinsight. The background is not as smooth as we could have hoped for, but we think this is due to lack of data. We intend to keep adding to this, and hopefully improve as we go. We did also do a luminance run and added it to the rgb, but this actually made the image a lot worse.

All comments welcomed.

Dave and Zoe

[Horwig]

Nice one, not much wrong with that. I played in PS with running a median filter over the background, protecting the stars and nebulosity, it did a good job of smoothing the image without loosing its detail and majesty.

Huw

[gingergeek]

Nice one Zoe

[PNJ]

Hi   nice shot, I have the same kit, and busy on m45 myself. but need more clear skies.

have you tried the range mask tool in PI to protect the bright stars and nebulosity. then invert and apply some noise reduction to background.  just a thought

paul j

[toxic]

lovely image indeed 

[Mr Spock]

Very nice - lots of data there to play with.

[Guest]

Thank you everyone . We haven't tried the range mask tool- will give it a go.

[laudropb]

Very nice work.

[NosyTrader]

Love this - excellent shot in my opinion!

[swag72]

Good nebulosity detail showing there and the colours are nice too

[ultranova]

_{Lots of fluffy stuff, like Sara said great colours}

_{well done}

_Paul

[Andre]

Well done ,beautifull.

[Barry-Wilson]

Excellent Dave & Zoe, fingers crossed for a break in the weather!

[ollypenrice]

Oh yes!

The key thing is that you have the faint reds (which I was once accused of having invented...) and they are for real. I think this is going really well and, once you start getting into the faint stuff, the target is anything but easy.

Great stuff.

Olly

[Guest]

Thank you everyone:) We are going to collect some more for this when we can. Olly, do you think taking the exposures up to 10 minutes would help our cause?

Zoe

[Guest]

We have now reprocessed this image using the range selection tool in PI as suggested by Paul. We hadn't tried using this tool before and were surprised at how well it works, so thank you Paul. So here is the reprocessed version with a couple of other tweaks, along with the original for comparison- just waiting for clear skies now to capture some more data... (The new version is the top image here).

Comments welcomed.

[NosyTrader]

This is wonderful. Love the detail!

[kev]

Oh. Im envious. I like that. A lot!

Sent from my iPhone so excuse the typos!

[opticalpath]

Excellent!  You captured the elusive faint red stuff really well.

Was this taken from a dark site?  I always find it difficult to capture the red nebulosity from my light-polluted location.

Adrian

[K3ny0n]

Very nice!

Rob.

[ollypenrice]

Thank you everyone:) We are going to collect some more for this when we can. Olly, do you think taking the exposures up to 10 minutes would help our cause?

Zoe

Going well. Very well!

Sub length depends on skyglow darkness. It will always help to go for longer subs in CCD provided you're not swamped by skyglow. Trial end error. No other way to know.

Olly

[Guest]

Thank you everyone again This was taken from the home observatory, not from a dark site, so we are quite pleased with the capture so far. Olly, we may try some longer exposures and see what effect they have- it may help with noise if nothing else.

[ollypenrice]

Thank you everyone again This was taken from the home observatory, not from a dark site, so we are quite pleased with the capture so far. Olly, we may try some longer exposures and see what effect they have- it may help with noise if nothing else.

I would. I'm a great advocate of taking the longest subs you can get away with when in search of anything faint.

Olly

[Guest]

So are we usualy- we thought we'd try shorter subs on this because of all the bright stars, but I think maybe longer is the way to go. Maybe we'll be lucky enough to get some clear nights over the Christmas break, though I don't think we'll be doing more of this target till the moon gets out of the way

[Stu1976j]

fantastic image