North America Nebula

[Kyle Allen]

This is my first time using APT to control my camera. I’m really impressed with how easy it is to use and it’s much more comfortable looking at the laptop screen to find and frame my target instead of craning my neck to look at the screen on the back of the camera. 

I managed to stack 90 x 1 minute exposures of the North America and Pelican Nebula. Taken with a Canon EOS 100D, Zenithstar 61 and Star Adventurer mount over the last couple of nights.

Thanks for looking! 😃

[Budgie1]

Hi Kyle, I hope you don't mind but I had a play with your image in Photoshop CS3.

I altered the levels, curves, brightness and contrast and found extra detail in it.

I hope you like what I found.

If this is what you got with 90 x 1 minute subs with an un-modded DSLR, then it gives me hope when I next get a clear night.

Martin

Edited September 6, 2020 by Budgie1

[Kyle Allen]

Martin, that’s brilliant. Thanks! 😀

I was also quite surprised at how much red my camera picked up considering it’s un-modded. I suppose this is quite a bright nebula though. 

[jiberjaber]

Nice wide capture, you've also ticked off Pelican Nebula in the bottom right quarter of the image 

[Budgie1]

2 hours ago, Kyle Allen said:

Martin, that’s brilliant. Thanks! 😀

I was also quite surprised at how much red my camera picked up considering it’s un-modded. I suppose this is quite a bright nebula though. 

Glad you like it.

I'm still getting to grips with the stretching images in PS3 so I'm sure there is more that can done to bring out more detail but I didn't want to go any further as I noticed it was starting to show noise on the left hand side of the image and the stars were starting to get bloated.

I don't know if you've got any software like PS but, if not, then have a look a Gimp. It's a free download, very similar to Photoshop, with plenty of tools to help you bring out what you've captured.  

[Kyle Allen]

I managed to add more exposure time to it. I didn't quite get the camera rotation the same though! This is 3 hours and 40 minutes in total. I used GIMP to process it and also tried adding a layer mask because the stars were getting big. It has helped to reduce their size slightly but the brighter stars have ended up with halos around them. I'm not sure what to do about that.