Wide Pleiades , 7 panel.

[ollypenrice]

Why seven???  😁 Because it proved much easier to make a 6 panel then to shoot a seventh with the main cluster in the middle. It helped Registar calibrate the four panels around the cluster image into a seamless block to which two more panels could then be added. When the faint stuff is going to be stretched till it screams a mosaic needs to be seamless.

Joint project with Paul Kummer who owns most of the rig in our robotic shed. That's a RASA 8 with ASI2600 OSC on Avalon Linear Fast Reverse. Paul handled remote capture and also did the DBE on each of the panels. I did the post processing.  Initially I was worried that we hadn't gone very deep in 3 hours per panel but it turns out there was plenty of signal buried away in there and, despite the hard stretching, this has had no noise reduction whatever. It wasn't an easy processing job, though, unlike the recent Veil we posted.

As ever, the Equalize adjustment in Photoshop proved invaluable, firstly to diagnose the accuracy of the mosaic blending and redo it where necessary.  Then I used an equalized image as a luminance mask for an extra stretch to bring out the faint stuff.

Olly

Edited December 13, 2021 by ollypenrice
Flip image.

[Skipper Billy]

In the words of the great impresario (Craig Revel-Horwood!) - Fab You Larse !!

Really outstanding imaging and processing.

[ollypenrice]

30 minutes ago, Skipper Billy said:

In the words of the great impresario (Craig Revel-Horwood!) - Fab You Larse !!

Really outstanding imaging and processing.

Most kind, Sir!

[AMcD]

Stunning.  You both really do set the standard to aspire to for capture and processing.

[vlaiv]

Olly, is that a feature of RASA scopes or is it down to processing?

I always thought it was down to processing / some sort of star reduction technique, but now I wonder if it is down to scope - as I've ever seen that on RASA images (this is actually second setup that I'm seeing it with).

I'm talking about this:

Star cores are very tight (much tighter than I would expect stars of that magnitude to be) - but they have halo, rather extensive one, around them.

[harry page]

Hi

I thought you were slowing down - giving us poor old souls a chance

As for the - not bad --- Not bad at all

I have found with the RSA the stars do bloat /halo a bit - every scope has its problems

Keep well

Harry

[RobertI]

Wonderful image - I've never seen the Pleiades looking like this before - amazing piece of work.

Edited December 13, 2021 by RobertI

[Kon]

Owo!!!! I think that's the best Pleiades I have seen! There is a lot more going on in terms of nebulosity around Pleiades than I thought. Fantastic job!

[geoflewis]

WOW...!!

[maw lod qan]

Incredible image!

[Mr Spock]

Quite spectacular 👍

[ollypenrice]

4 hours ago, vlaiv said:

Olly, is that a feature of RASA scopes or is it down to processing?

I always thought it was down to processing / some sort of star reduction technique, but now I wonder if it is down to scope - as I've ever seen that on RASA images (this is actually second setup that I'm seeing it with).

I'm talking about this:

Star cores are very tight (much tighter than I would expect stars of that magnitude to be) - but they have halo, rather extensive one, around them.

You should have seen them before the repair processing, Vlad! That's as good as I could get them without spending even longer on fixing those halos around medium bright stars. It's a RASA thing, certainly, and the harder you're stretching the surrounding region the greater the problem is. It's also true, I think, that this dusty region does produce genuine stellar light scatter at source. You're also right that the tight cores are odd, but that's the RASA again. You get a tight, bright stellar core surrounded by a rather flat and much fainter extended glow. I was just talking to Tom O'Donoghue about this. Note how small and tight the brightest stars of the main cluster are as they sit in the blue nebulosity. They are smaller and tighter than my refractor M45 stellar cores but I think those RASA outer glows are swamped by the blue nebulosity.

No optic is perfect. On the other hand the RASA has got us as deep as this in three ours (per panel.) On balance I like it.  But the halos are inherent to the data, they are not processing artifacts.

4 hours ago, harry page said:

Hi

I thought you were slowing down - giving us poor old souls a chance

As for the - not bad --- Not bad at all

I have found with the RSA the stars do bloat /halo a bit - every scope has its problems

Keep well

Harry

Harry, you're back! I was just beginning to get worried about you and was on the point of dropping you a line. I am slowing down a bit for sure, though! 🤣

Olly

[vineyard]

Gorgeous- most interesting (& ofc beautiful) image I can remember seeing of M45.  With the bright stars having this tighter core, M45 doesn't dominate the nebulosity as much as it does in normal images: for some reason, I'm reminded of an old schooner making its way through v stormy seas...

[harry page]

24 minutes ago, ollypenrice said:

Harry, you're back! I was just beginning to get worried about you and was on the point of dropping you a line. I am slowing down a bit for sure, though! 🤣

Olly

Been busy at work - which seems to take more out of me these days + daughter got married a short while ago  all seemed to leave me with little spare time.

enough moaning , I will be back soon

 

Harry

[Laurin Dave]

Fabulous image Olly..  very deep, had me a bit confused though as it’s reversed left to to right 

Dave

[tomato]

Deep and wide and 3 hrs per panel, pretty much ticks all the boxes.👍

[gorann]

Yes, that is a truly great image Olly! Very very deep. Like Dave you had me confused about the orientation - RASA images have to be flipped as there is only one mirror in the system (I am sure you know that and just forgot  - I do it all the time). And yes, the RASA produces tight star cores but since it goes so deep it also record star halos more than other scopes. As you say, some may be light scattering near the stars, but some may be from our atmosphere. Maybe it is also in the optics (not sure how one can tell), but with the deep data you get with a RASA you cannot stop yourself from stretching to see how far you can go and then you get into halo territory. Here is my humble 1-panel RASA version of it from last year, with a lot of stretch to get all that dust, and there are halos. Maybe it is the optics but I suspect that there is true light scattering going on before the light reach the scope......

Cheers, Göran

[simmo39]

Another great image Olly.

[ollypenrice]

8 hours ago, Laurin Dave said:

Fabulous image Olly..  very deep, had me a bit confused though as it’s reversed left to to right 

Dave

Brain fade. There's a lot of it about, these days, between my ears... Thanks, I'll fix it.

lly

[Ags]

Speculactular!