Flaming Star and Tadpoles nebulae in Ha

[alexbb]

I think I'm done with the Hydrogen layer for these nebulae. I started 3 weeks ago a 4 panel mosaic with the 130PDS. I shot around 2h on each panel in 180s subs at 300 gain. And recently I thought to lower the noise in the darker areas and I shot another 7h with the Canon 300 F4 L and I combined the dark areas. I see now that I should have taken more frames with the scope as the quality of the image taken through the lens is way lower. Anyway, I still combined them a bit.

The plan is to add LRGB too in the future and perhaps some O3 as well.

Full resolution 16 bit .png here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0ByhJ_xuQxcnjNjdyMUpqSkJFYUU

And, in order: the image taken with the lens, the one with the scope and the blend.

Thoughts are welcomed.

Clear skies,

Alex

[Allinthehead]

Nice job. The blend seems to have more to it. This should look great with colour. 

[Tommohawk]

Looks very nice to me - should look good with the RGB I think!

The lens image is maybe a little off, but focusing the lens is always a bit tricky - do you have a micro-thingy? Also I guess the scope is F5 and the lens F4 so maybe not a fair comparison.

[alexbb]

Thanks Richard, Tom!

I lifted the curves on the blend a little more. And about the lens, it's the lens itself that doesn't want to behave. The IS element inside seems to do whatever it wants. The (manual and no aids) focus is not perfect, it's adjusted to have the smallest stars overall.

[Tommohawk]

I've read lots of reports of IS type issues - so obvious question perhaps, but cant you switch the IS off?

[alexbb]

It doesn't matter how I set it on the lens, it won't power and do anything since I don't connect the lens to a Canon camera, nor the adapter has any electronics. My feeling is that is moving inside the lens a bit free - more or less.

[Rodd]

Nice wide field.  Well done

Rodd

[alexbb]

Thanks, Rodd!

I noticed that I have some coma towards the top-right corner, I think I didn't collimate the scope very well at the beginning. I adjusted the mirrors after I shot the first panel.
Anyway, I hope I can seamlessly fix it, I will care more about it when I'll have all the channels.