Elephant in the Mist

[steppenwolf]

I thought I was in for a real treat tonight with what looked like a half reasonable sky but that dang high cloud and mist came in early and I had to abandon my session after just 7 subs . My target was the Elephant Trunk Nebula (IC1396) but I need a lot more subs than this unfortunately. 7 Subs of 600 seconds each with SXVF-M25C CCD and SW ED80 Refractor.

[CELESCOPE]

Its there Steve , darn shame about this Mist though, so frustrating,the sky looking so good ,then down, or should i say up it comes, still u did get a pretty good one there , but know what u mean , u not happy till u can get a decent amount of subs ,

Rog

[MrEd]

Hi Steve

For 7 subs thats still good shooting....

Mother nature can be a bit cruel sometimes.

Nice detail coming through though.

Ed

[Paxo]

Excellent image given the conditions Steve, lots of detail in there.

Steve..

[Beyond_Vision]

Despite the subs being cut short the dark lanes stand out really well. Looking forward to when you grab some more data.

Regards

Kevin

[SteveL]

I hope you dont mind, I had a quick go at star size reduction, and its amazing what detail you do have lurking in there, its just detracted by the oversize starts due to the cloud/mist

[barkis]

Awful bad luck Steve, it has the makings of a pearler with the extra subs you wanted.

As it is, it's pretty effective. You will get another chance to complete what you've started hopefully.

Ron.

[RobH]

Cracking work for so few subs Steve....be patient, there'll be time to add more and what you have is looking pretty darned good anyway

Cheers

Rob

[steppenwolf]

Thanks for the re-work, Steve - those stars really did bloat with the mist - great pity. NC's tool run twice certainly stops the stars from masking the nebula detail.

[SteveL]

NCs "reduce star size" is really only designed to be run once, as it does has a "smoothing" element in the action, so I did the reduction manually. I almost got to the point where I removed the stars completely, and that looked great but odd... :shock:

[steppenwolf]

"reduce star size" is really only designed to be run once, as it does has a "smoothing" element in the action,

Agree completely - I placed your re-worked image and the original in PD7 and then applied NC's tool but it didn't quite match but a second iteration gave a perfect match but as you say, the smoothing started to show. The effect is rather like over-using 'Neat Image', you get a smoother image but the stars start to turn to 'lines'.