M27 at Kelling

[madjohn]

Another one from Kelling Heath.

9 X 4 min subs, darks subtracted at ISO 800, taken on a unmodified Canon 450D, no filters.

Taken at prime focus of a Skywatcher Equinox 120, mounted on a NEQ6, guided via PHD.

Stacked and registered in Deep sky stacker, processed in photoshop.

John

[TakMan]

Hey, that's a great result!

Plenty of stars (with colour), nice 'n' round also, and some Ha showing in the outer regions of your main target to boot - and on an unmodded DSLR - you've got to be chuffed with that!?

It's not even noisy, so you've used a deft hand with processing also....

Would it help to darken the background 'just a tad' to make it slightly less 'muddy' for want of a better phrase - perhaps it would just lift M27 too, even a slight boost to hue/saturation/contrast...?

Don't take any of that the wrong way though - a great result!

Congrats...

Damian

[madjohn]

Thanks for the kind comments Damien, I'm fairly new to this image processing malarky and I've tried to be very careful not to stretch the images too much to try to suppress the noise.

As for darkening the image, I feel it looks more natural that way, there is always skyglow in the upper atmosphere, even at the darkest sites, and I think that a really dark background just doesn't look right to me! I suppose I'm more of a visual observer than a imager!

Thanks for the critique,

John

[daz]

Looks like clear skies were in abundance for everyone! A great image John!