Flame and Horsehead - with 1200d and 300mm F4L

[powerlord]

Hi chaps - making progress! considering only been doing this astro business for 2 months I'm pretty pleased with last night's results - one I've been building up to as I knew it would need some long exposures.

In the end I only got 37 lights before it went behind my neighbours house, but it still came our better than I could have hoped really. 😀

37 lights @ 1600 iso, 60 seconds. darks, flats, darkflats and bias. Processed in APP, edited in Affinity Photo. Of which this is just my first attempt tbh. I've been watching @AstroRuz videos on affinity editing and will have a few more goes as I'm losing some of the detail in the flame at the moment when I'm bringing the rest out.

[callisto]

That's very nice...well done 👍

 

Mark

[The Lazy Astronomer]

Very nice - l haven't even tried to attempt horsehead fearing my lack of skill to keep Alnitak under control.

One thing though: the stars in the top right of the frame are all grey, like they've been completely desaturated?

[powerlord]

I have a massive band across the image caused by some very weird high level cloud - and I'm basically struggling to get at the stars, black and nebulosity - attaching the raw stacked 32 bit  tiff so you can see the issue. Above I've definately piled on the saturation too much, but even starting again and working on now - I'm struggling to get the detail out without adding tons of noise to the non-nebula areas. 🤔

I will add, I'm really happy with the AZ GTI in EQ mode now - that's 60 secs exposures Im getting now, with one round of align and polar align. In AZ/ALT mode I couldn't reliably get 10 seconds.

more affinity and photoshop tutorials required me thinks..

any suggestions/help greatly appreciated.

 

 

IC434_HorseHead_and_Flame-RGB-session_1-St.calibrated.background.tiff

[ollypenrice]

You're right to be pleased. Let's move straight to to the suggestions section:

There's evidence of the error everyone makes at the beginning, and that's black clipping. And here's the proof:

The histogram should always have a thin flat line left of the peak. If it doesn't, you have thrown away hard-won data captured at the telescope.

A healthy histogram looks like this. See the flat line left of the peak.

When it's black clipped it looks like this:

The histogram peak is jammed up hard against the left and the background sky is jet black with the nebulosity jumping up out if it very abruptly.

There is always the temptation to use black clipping to remove light pollution gradients but that is not the way forward.

Olly

 

 

[powerlord]

thanks, yeh i've just watched a tutorial that talks about making sure you go down to about 30ish. I wish I'd had more time for more lights, but its a good master to play with and learn on  - so I'll start again tomorrow.

[powerlord]

So here's another attempt, less extreme.