NGC 1909 The Witch Head Nebula

[roundycat]

Hi all, please don't laugh, this one took me ages. Having come to astrophotography from 'ordinary' photography my main interest is in making pretty pictures. You won't find any science hiding in my work. This does allow for the occasional cheat and the picture below is all cheat.

The idea came from a version of this nebula that I saw some time ago. The picture is shown south up and laterally reversed so as to depict the Witch laying back and gazing at the bright star. Needless to say, the other version was beautiful.

150m of RGB to capture the nebula including a lot of extra blue as that is where the signal is and a 12m quickie to capture Rigel which is a bit bright to say the least. I must have spent three to four hours just taming the gradients which are all over the place and then selected the nebula from the 'bright' picture and layered it into the darker picture.

Next time I might try layer masking a la M42 core but it wouldn't work with the data I had. All done with the FSQ and Artemis 11002 on one night.

Dennis

shown just for fun is one of the B subs showing the aeroplane trails, bias artefacts and heaven knows what else.

[Whippy]

No laughing here mate, that's a very good stab at it. I was eyeing this up as a target but my understanding is that it's a difficult object to do well epecially at the latitudes we live at. If I've got a criticism of it, it looks a little too heavy in the Blue but I'd be pretty chuffed if it was my attempt.

Tony..

[barkis]

I agree, it is a great start to your conversion, and you don't take the easy route do you?.

Also you have a great knowledge of Processing, so you have a great future in this new discipline.

Your image looks fine, and I'm not all that clued up, so I couldn't offer any meaningful advice anyway.

Ron.

[Roy]

That's a very difficult one to image Dennis and one we don't see to much of, I like it

[RobH]

Nice one Dennis....a tough target from all accounts, and you've really got it looking like some ancient crone from Macbeth!!

Cheers

Rob