Too much time on my hands....!

[Kokatha man]

Well, at least it's a little different....!

I thought I'd post my first lazy Sunday doodling effort.....

This was about 2&1/2 hours of sheer learning curve with CS3 tools that has left me exhausted.....definitely a practise exercise but I have turned the full size image into a pretty cool desktop background! (well, imho it is!)

Saturn and Mars need some gamma to darken their limbs aka Jupiter, and I just grabbed a single jpeg of a single sub of some widefield I did lawd-knows-when for the base background.....had to clip the blackpoint of my M31 widie really savagely in this slack-arsed effort (effort quality, not the amount of exertion!) to get a half-acceptable background blend for the sky overall: and the Moon, although I consider this mono through the old 6" achro to be my best "moonie" - was also only a jpeg - I've flamin lost the tiff and RAW shots from the 50D (or was it the old 20D..?!?)

I've taken complete license with scale etc but I think sticking my Ganymede in might be too OTT..!!!

But down the track this trial effort will get a “full monty” 'cos I got sufficient satisfaction from this "first-up" to believe with experience that I can do much better.....boy, some of those selection etc tools are tricky little blighters - and there are plenty of extra "tricks" to employing 'em successfully..!!!:(

All images by Milika & Nicholas (me and my wife) using either C11 & DBK21, or SW 6" achro and Canon 50D (Moon) or Canon 50D and Canon F4L lens at 184mm (for M31) – which was barely 20 or so degrees above the Northern horizon at the time here at latitude 35 degrees South.....wish I could provide a link to the full-size image but I can't - but will work something like that out when I do the final, proper effort....!

I have half a dozen RAWS to DSS for the background and with this experiemce under my belt hope to do much better next time around....!

[GazOC]

Superb. I tried something similar a couple of years ago for my desktop, it was nowhere near as good as that though.

[Beyond_Vision]

A very nice compostion I did one a while back of the outer planets and the Moon.

Regards

Kevin

[AztecastroMcJ]

very nice

Jupiter and Mars esp are excellent