A Rusty Elephant's Trunk

[Ikonnikov]

It's been an age since I've made anything other than mono images (a combination of incessant scope tweaking and lack of clear moonless nights) so since I've finally managed to get some both some HA and OIII for a target I thought I'd try a bicolour.

The image comprises 9x30 min subs of both Ha and OIII (3nm Chroma) with my G3 16200 on the E130D/Avalon linear. Contrast is a bit lower than it might be due to effects of the full moon and poor transparency in a lot of the subs and I've probably overcooked it for the amount of signal present. I've not used any flats yet (to do list) and there still seems to be some vignetting in the corners despite judicious use of DBE. The brightest stars also escaped some masking and have gone a bit crazy, maybe I'll try to fix with RGB data if I can get some anytime soon.

Any comments/advice on how to improve the image are very welcome

Paul

 

elephantprinttest2016.tif

[jazza]

Woah, she's a real beauty! Nice work!

[Ikonnikov]

Thanks, glad you like it!

[Notty]

That's beautiful!  Contrast looks just great to me. 

[PatrickGilliland]

Nice work Paul - palette def adds some contracts and detail.  Well created.

Paddy

[Ikonnikov]

Thanks Paddy, a bit of a happy accident maybe with the final palette. Hoping for some haze-free nights to see if I can get some OIII subs without star halos (plus the whole OIII channel could do with a bit more signal being so weak here).