30 panel M45 to California...

[ollypenrice]

Another with Paul Kummer, who organized capture and preprocessing. Post processing is mine. We aimed for 3 hours per panel but naturally there was weather-induced variation.

RASA 8, ASI2600MC, Avalon Linear Fast Reverse, located here at Les Granges. ABE, Blur XT and SCNR green in PI then Photoshop for the rest. This is a thumbnail, so to speak, but there's a larger one on my gallery site in the link. This was unexpectedly easy to process.

Link to larger version: https://ollypenrice.smugmug.com/Other/DUSTY-DARK-AND-MILKY-WAY-TARGETS/i-Rp94h6z/A

Olly and Paul.

 

[simmo39]

That looks amazing!

[Dinglem]

That is stunning, both of you have done an amazing job on capturing and processing this image!!

[Lee_P]

Incredible, that's really something. 

 

[callisto]

Wowsers... that's amazing 👍

[The Lazy Astronomer]

Soooo dusty! Is this straight RGB, or is there some Ha in the California neb?

Edit: this image felt strangely familiar - I just realised why:

 

Edited January 25, 2023 by The Lazy Astronomer

[gorann]

I just repeat here what I just said about your Astrobin post:

That is just outstanding Olly & Paul, I have seen nothing like these 30 panels revealing how dust is connecting it all together! And if you imagine seeing repetitions in neighboring structures, this one is a prime example.
Cheers, Göran

Edited January 25, 2023 by gorann

[Ratlet]

That's incredible.  How do you avoid diffraction spikes from the camera cabling?

[symmetal]

Amazing Image. I like how M45 illuminates the dust giving it two arms you don't see in the usual Pleiades images. 🤗

Alan

[ollypenrice]

1 hour ago, The Lazy Astronomer said:

Soooo dusty! Is this straight RGB, or is there some Ha in the California neb?

Edit: this image felt strangely familiar - I just realised why:

 

Yes, Rogelio pioneered this framing of targets, I think. He has a distinctive style in astrophotography, which is different from mine and Paul's, but he had a great idea in bringing these objects together. It is 99% straight RGB. For the bright part of the California I had a 30 hour HaOIIILRGB image which I blended in a low opacity but this didn't add to the extensions. It was really just a lazy way of getting the bright parts into good shape. Essentially this is straight RGB.

31 minutes ago, Ratlet said:

That's incredible.  How do you avoid diffraction spikes from the camera cabling?

After trying a full circle arrangement, which gave oddly tilted outer haloes, we settled on this arrangement and now we just get decent stars.

19 minutes ago, symmetal said:

Amazing Image. I like how M45 illuminates the dust giving it two arms you don't see in the usual Pleiades images. 🤗

Alan

Thanks. The blue extended 'pincers' are not new to this image, though. I was fascinated by them myself in an image I admired about ten years ago. I did a very clunky, undersampled camera lens attempt ages ago and, although it found them, it was very rough. The speed of the RASA makes it easy to get a nicer result.

Olly

Edited January 25, 2023 by ollypenrice
clarification

[Neil_104]

Fascinating image! It's nice to see something different and unfamiliar (not that the more familiar objects are any less enjoyable of course :)

[ONIKKINEN]

Absolutely incredible.

What bin level is this, must be at least 5x? Aperture at resolution doing some serious lifting with how just about every corner of the image is filled with detail where normally one would expect to have background.

[wimvb]

Excellent image. The "pincers" I have seen and imaged before, but that weak red glow to the right of M45 is new to me. Although, reexamining an image of M45 that I took 5 years ago, I can see a very faint hint of it.

And I agree with @gorann, there are definitely repeating structures between M45 and the California nebula.

[ollypenrice]

19 minutes ago, ONIKKINEN said:

Absolutely incredible.

What bin level is this, must be at least 5x? Aperture at resolution doing some serious lifting with how just about every corner of the image is filled with detail where normally one would expect to have background.

Thanks. 

Before post-processing, I resized Paul's linear mosaic from a width of 15862 pixels to 7000 pixels. This was intended as a first attempt at processing, to make life easier for some of the software routines. My intention was to re-do it at a larger size if all went well. I think, having seen it as it is, that I'll stick with this rendition unless Paul wants me to go for bigger. The web JPEG is resampled down a little more to a width of 6000 pixels.

Regarding the faint dust, an idea I had a few years ago works even better now that we can use it on starless images. In Ps, create a copy layer of the starless and also copy that onto a layer mask. Equalize the layer mask (in Image, Adjustments), blur it and increase its contrast, then gently stretch through it. The idea isn't new, just this easy way of doing it.

Olly

Edited January 25, 2023 by ollypenrice
clarification

[tomato]

An amazing vista, there is just so much dust and yet in reality it is so tenuous, it only becomes visible on this epic scale.

You should both be appointed (along with @gorann) to the Celestron sales team.😊

[bomberbaz]

exquisite Olly, simply sublime details, colour, dusty swirls almost like a swirling river.