Hyades HDR

[Scooot]

The skies were much better on Saturday so I had another go at capturing different exposures. 73 10 secs, thirty 30 secs & 15 1 minutes but the minutes were no good, mist or cloud ruined them. All at ISO 800. I used Pixinsights HDR composition to combine the stacked 10 seconds with the 30 seconds. I'm not sure to what degree it improved the 30 seconds on their own, or if I'd just stacked them all together. Anyway, Aldebaran was at 53 degrees when I started at around 10 pm so the light pollution wasn't anywhere near as bad as when took the previous image. There are also many more stars. I'm still a bit perplexed by the colours of a few of the brighter stars opposite Aldebaran which are clearly described as yellow/orange and appear so in some other images. Maybe its just my skies? Anyway here it is  

I used my Takumar 135mm with the 450D on the Star Adventurer again

[Scooot]

Had a go at reprocessing this in a different way. This time I stacked all the short exposures with the 30 second ones. I then processed the Luminance and colour separately which enabled me to bring out more detail. However I do have bigger defraction spikes, even though I reduced the star size a bit. The contrast seems better and the stars are brighter