The Pleaides

[Scooot]

I actually had some clear skies without any moonlight so managed to get a good couple of nights worth of subs on M45. This is just over 5 hours worth of 3 minute images at zero gain with my baby Tak and ASI2600MC-PRO. One of my better efforts

 

[saac]

I really like that @Scooot; you've certainly caught some of the feinter gas cloud and to my eye your background processing is spot on.  I like the way you have a depth to the blue hue in the centre, my attempt at the moment is showing the same intensity throughout and less surrounding cloud. I need to catch a lot more data  

Jim 

[Scooot]

4 minutes ago, saac said:

I really like that @Scooot; you've certainly caught some of the feinter gas cloud and to my eye your background processing is spot on.  I like the way you have a depth to the blue hue in the centre, my attempt at the moment is showing the same intensity throughout and less surrounding cloud. I need to catch a lot more data  

Jim 

Thanks Jim. I spent a lot of effort trying to get a decent stack in the first place which made processing the background much easier than I usually find it. I think I’ve finally got to grips with local normalisation for which I manually stacked half a dozen decent images to use as a reference. I processed a starless image too which also helped a great deal with the background and gasses.

[Barv]

That's lovely! Looks really natural to me. Perfect processing! 😀

[Scooot]

25 minutes ago, Barv said:

That's lovely! Looks really natural to me. Perfect processing! 😀

Thanks Harvey.

[Scooot]

Here's an annotated version.

Edited November 1, 2023 by Scooot

[Scooot]

and here's something a little different.

A 3d plot. You can clearly see the bulk of the smaller stars with very pointed peaks illustrating they're correctly exposed. However, not that you'd notice from the main image, the larger stars are illustrated by domes with flattish tops showing they're over exposed and saturated. To expose them correctly I'd guess I'd only need an exposure of a few seconds, 10 to 15 maybe.

 

Edited November 1, 2023 by Scooot