46P/Wirtanen passing Capella

[Scooot]

The same image taken on Christmas Eve I posted in the wide field section.

There’s about 50 minutes worth of 30 second subs at ISO400 at 135mm on the Star Adventurer, taken at F4 with my Canon 450D and processed in PixInsight.

 

[happy-kat]

You've captured much data then I did (from similar frame count), I like the proximity to Capella. Was is not too foggy for you?

[Scooot]

1 hour ago, happy-kat said:

You've captured much data then I did (from similar frame count), I like the proximity to Capella. Was is not too foggy for you?

Hmm I don't remember it being foggy, maybe a bit hazy later on, I seem to remember I threw away quite a few near the end

Here's a couple of unprocessed subs. The first one was at 20:51 & the last at 22:11. 

I created two stacks, one aligned on the comet with most of the stars rejected, and one aligned on the stars. As Capella is so bright I couldn't get rid of the star trail in the comet only image. So I cropped out the Capella side of the Comet only stack, and cropped out the Comet side of the Star stack. I then used Pixinsight’s Gradientmergemosaic tool to recombine the good Comet half with the good star half. I did this in the linear stage before any other processing.

Now you know you can see that the far left side of the image doesn't show so many faint stars. This is because the pixel rejection of the comet only stack was higher and didn't retain so many stars. I think this is why anyway. However it does mean I get a nice clean image of Capella and its surroundings with plenty of depth so a bit of a compromise.  

 

 

[happy-kat]

It is sure proving a tricky processing challenge. That's an idea I had not considered to blend two images in that way, so far I have done two images but layered over rather then joined sideways.

(PS only one image per challenge entry otherwise they may review the entry on the wrong one)

[Scooot]

8 minutes ago, happy-kat said:

It is sure proving a tricky processing challenge. That's an idea I had not considered to blend two images in that way, so far I have done two images but layered over rather then joined sideways.

(PS only one image per challenge entry otherwise they may review the entry on the wrong one)

I think it works quite well because it’s the same image so merging gives it a perfect join, other than the different stacking already mentioned. I don’t know whether processing both halves separately before merging might get a better over all result, I’ll have to try it. I’m thinking of trying something similar with the Luna eclipse and stars, if it’s clear that is. Although I haven’t fully thought it through so not sure whether it will work.