Firsty image of the year, M45

[Horwig]

No, I'm not posting early! This is my ONLY image of 2022, work and weather have conspired against me all year.

This was captured over three nights, 12th to the 14th of Dec 2022

Six hours L, Two hours each RGB

ZWO 6200MM through reduced FGQ106, mounted on AZ-EQ6

This is a half sized image, helps smooth out noise.

I find myself having to re-learn with every image, 2021 saw me only achieve one image as well.

 

Huw

[Roy Foreman]

Nice image. I like the dust in the vicinity of the cluster. I've been waiting 6 months for a night clear enough for imaging so I know how you feel. Maybe 2023 will be a better year for us all.

[Horwig]

The stuff you learn in a few hours, started playing with Russell Croman's BlurXterminator this afternoon - what a cracking piece of software!

The nights I imaged M45 had pants seeing, and I had to hit the luminance hard with local contrast enhance to get any nebulosity at all to stand out.

Just a quick play with the same data, but using BlurXTerminator gave amazing results, the image below is a 100% crop of new and old processing, I'll let you guess which is which.

Are they even of the same star target?

[CCD Imager]

Maybe only one image a year, but worth the wait

And yes, Russ Croman's software works its magic! Seems to add some red to your image or was that you tweaking colour balance?

Adrian

[Horwig]

2 hours ago, CCD Imager said:

Maybe only one image a year, but worth the wait

And yes, Russ Croman's software works its magic! Seems to add some red to your image or was that you tweaking colour balance?

Adrian

Thanks, yes, it's been a long time since I last imaged anything.

Colour difference I think is down to my inconsistent processing, the original looked just too blue when I went back to it, here's a further re-work with BXT applied, also tried GHS to stretch the data, I usually just stretch by eye in photoshop. This is a full size file, not reduced as the original was.

Not sure of the stretch, it looked too flat, just like masked stretch does (that's my opinion, others will no doubt disagree), so I've tweeked it by eye, some feedback would be appreciated.

H