Orion, its belt and Nebula M42 in North Cornwall

[AstroNebulee]

I woke around 1.30 am on Friday 9-10-20 after grabbing a few hours sleep from an imaging session of Mars and saw Orion just coming into view, I grabbed my canon 450d with 7-300mm tamron lens and tripod and set up.  I took a series of lights, darks & white ones(cant remember the name is it flats?)  one set for M42 at 300mm, one set for Orion's belt at 300mm and the last set for the widest possible I could get of Orion at 70mm, iso of 1600 and exposure of 2.5 secs as not tracking and to prevent star trails. I processed them in sequator as I seem to get on better with this than DSS.  I'm especially pleased with the widest shot of Orion as it stayed sharp and the colour of the stars stood out well.  Its my first real attempt after many huge learning curves with my dslr, id like to get the omegon mini trak lx2 to help with longer exposures and no power needed.  |Clear skies

[astro mick]

A nice set of images indeed,and top marks for staying power.

Always nice to see Orion again.

Mick.

[AstroNebulee]

10 minutes ago, astro mick said:

A nice set of images indeed,and top marks for staying power.

Always nice to see Orion again.

Mick.

Thank you Mick, not to bad for my first dslr go at Orion. I've been looking forward to observing and imaging Orion since I started astronomy in April. There's so much to see there and easy to spot. I hadn't noticed before but the 's' shape of stars between Alnilam & Mintaka looks amazing. Clear skies 

Edited October 11, 2020 by LeeHore7

[ollypenrice]

Good stuff. It would be worth having a look at your colour balance in processing because, at the moment, you have a quite insistent blue bias.

Olly

[AstroNebulee]

6 hours ago, ollypenrice said:

Good stuff. It would be worth having a look at your colour balance in processing because, at the moment, you have a quite insistent blue bias.

Olly

Thank you olly, I'll take your advice on board and have a play altering the blue side of the colour balance, I'm still so very new to astrophotography and know I won't get stand out photos just happy to get something to show family what is possible to see in the night sky and have a record of it. Clear skies 📷🌌🔭

[AstroNebulee]

@ollypenriceI've gone into PS and altered the images now to make them less blue tinted, hopefully looking better, clear skies 🌌📷🔭

[ollypenrice]

In Photoshop you can go to the Eyedropper menu and select the Colour Sampler Tool. In the top bar you can then choose 3x3 average as a sample size. This lets you put 4 sample points on the background and the readings appear in the info box. I like to get the background equal in all three channels with a brightness of 22 or 23 ideally. One way to adjust is to use the colour balance tool set to shadows.

Olly

[AstroNebulee]

@ollypenriceI'll give this a go, thank you for your help in my imaging experience, there's a lot to learn, even if I can be a quarter good if all the imagers on here I'll be happy 

[ollypenrice]

49 minutes ago, LeeHore7 said:

@ollypenriceI'll give this a go, thank you for your help in my imaging experience, there's a lot to learn, even if I can be a quarter good if all the imagers on here I'll be happy 

In imaging there is no single step which is difficult. The difficulty arises from the fact that there are so many small steps!

Olly

[AstroNebulee]

17 hours ago, ollypenrice said:

In Photoshop you can go to the Eyedropper menu and select the Colour Sampler Tool. In the top bar you can then choose 3x3 average as a sample size. This lets you put 4 sample points on the background and the readings appear in the info box. I like to get the background equal in all three channels with a brightness of 22 or 23 ideally. One way to adjust is to use the colour balance tool set to shadows.

Olly

Hi @ollypenrice I have uploaded a screenshot of the steps you've suggested and set my 4 eyedropper points and brought up the colour sampler tool, which values ont eh info page am I looking to adjust the sliders with, sorry if I'm being thick.

[ollypenrice]

21 minutes ago, LeeHore7 said:

Hi @ollypenrice I have uploaded a screenshot of the steps you've suggested and set my 4 eyedropper points and brought up the colour sampler tool, which values ont eh info page am I looking to adjust the sliders with, sorry if I'm being thick.

 

No problem. In the yellow box you see four sections, 1,2,3 and 4. Each one refers to a sample point. The brightness values for each channel, R,G and B have two values next to them. The first one, identified in red, is the present value. When you open a tool which can change the present values, as you have done with the Colour Balance tool, a second figure appears to the right of the present value. That's the new value, highlighted in green, which will show you what the tool does as you adjust it.  In the screen grab below, the Colour Balance sliders are all at zero so the new and old values in the info window are the same. Move the sliders, though, and the new values will change in real time.

 

You can see in boxes 1 and 3 that the blues are much higher than the rest.

I think you'd do better to stretch the image rather more before looking into the colour balance.

At some point you are going to want to acquire a gradient-removing tool. Gradient Xterminator is a good plug-in tool for Photoshop. Personally I use Dynamic Background Extraction in Pixinsight. AstroArt also has a gradient remover, as does Astro Pixel Processor. A gradient is just a gradual drift in brghtness across an image. You'll get them even from very dark sites.

Olly

 

 

Edited October 18, 2020 by ollypenrice
Typo

[AstroNebulee]

Thanks @ollypenrice I shall have a go at that , thank you for your invaluable help and I expect I'll be back with further updates and requests for help, sorry if I'm being a pain.

[ollypenrice]

42 minutes ago, LeeHore7 said:

Thanks @ollypenrice I shall have a go at that , thank you for your invaluable help and I expect I'll be back with further updates and requests for help, sorry if I'm being a pain.

No pain at all! That's what the forum is for.

Olly

[ultranova]

That's come out well,

I admire your will power to get up again and have another go

We all have to start some where in the great hobby of ours,

and your certainly on the right track, 

the only way to learn is through making mistakes and asking the question

how can I make it better,

Like Olly said lots of little steps..

well done 

Paul

[AstroNebulee]

3 hours ago, ultranova said:

That's come out well,

I admire your will power to get up again and have another go

We all have to start some where in the great hobby of ours,

and your certainly on the right track, 

the only way to learn is through making mistakes and asking the question

how can I make it better,

Like Olly said lots of little steps..

well done 

Paul

Thank you Paul, I know I'm never going to get amazing pictures with my set up but like to get something and will keep pushing to learn about the imaging side of things, this is only the start of imaging with my dslr and will hopefully improve more, clear skies 📷🔭🌌

[happy-kat]

Great start and don't be shy of using what you have with a static tripod.

a challenge for your lens

Personally I have found sequator poor when using a lens prone to ch4romatic aberration as the stack always seems to exaggerate it, I get better raw data to process out of DSS.

This is quite a nice workflow whilst it is a closer view of Orion you might find it helpful as many tools are the same/similar across different software link

Edited October 19, 2020 by happy-kat
Swipe spelling!

[AstroNebulee]

1 hour ago, happy-kat said:

Great start and don't be shy of using what you have with a static tripod.

a challenge for your lens

Personally I have found sequator poor when using a lens prone to ch4romatic aberration as the stack always seems to ethicise it, I get better raw data to process out of DSS.

This is quite a nice workflow whilst it is a closer view of Orion you might find it helpful as many tools are the same/similar across different software link

Thank you Kat, it was interesting to see his workflow for imaging and see how it differs slightly from others. I'm getting more uses to dss as I managed to image M31 during the week. I had a clear ish sky tonight with some very high light cloud but managed to image M31 with lights, darks, flats and bias at 1600iso 1m exposure, I'll process these moro using the instructional video and sort a new post to put it in, clear skies 🌌📷🔭

[Chris33benoit]

Waited all summer to shoot this beauty.  Here is mine taken this week just before going to work.  Nikon D3200, 50mm, ISO800,  F/2.2 20 seconds single shot, NYX tracker.  Never saw Betelgeuse yellow.  First time trying a 50mm at that F/stop.  I like it!