Orion and Friends

[Andrew*]

This is the fourth attempt to get some kind of reasonable result from data from two weeks ago! I've never had such a tough time processing an image. Difficulty was due to harsh vignetting from the lens on one corner and skyglow from the other corner.

Anyway, capture was simple enough - piggybacked my 450D on the HEQ5, and let it run while I did some observing.

As such I'm very pleased with the result, but I know that with some extra skill and processing power there's much more in the data. If anyone fancies having a go, I'll be very interested to see what you can do with it.

Details:

Camera: Modified 450D with 17-70mm Sigma lens at 17mm

Equipment: HEQ5 mount and ball/socket head, CLS clip filter

Exposure: 27x180 seconds at f/4, ISO 800

Processing: Stacked in DSS, post processed in CS3

Andrew

[msinclairinork]

Thats a great wide field Andrew!

You must be pleased with that!

Michael

[wolfgang.f]

Amazing what you do with a standard camera lens :-) Would that be the full image or a crop?

Fantastic picture!

Wolfgang

[steppenwolf]

Hi Andrew,

I have had a little play with your image -well done on capturing so much of Barnard's Loop by the way.

[G2EWS]

Hi Andrew,

That is great.

Regards

Chris

[Andrew*]

Thanks for your comments folk!

Steve, you've done a great job in balancing the background. What did you do?

Andrew

P.S. Fancy a 120MB TIFF?

[steppenwolf]

Hi Andrew,

1. I selected the main areas of nebulosity and then inverted the selection to select everything but the nebulous regions and ran Gradient Xterminator on the image.

2. I produced a duplicate layer and enhanced the saturation.

3. I copied this layer to a new file, converted it to LAB mode and increased the contrast of the 'a' channel - this boosts just the red areas and then copied this image back on top of the original.

4. I duplicated this top layer and ran Noise Ninja on it to smooth the background a little and then adjusted the opacity of this final layer to about 75% to get some 'noise' back to ensure the detail remained.

[saturn5]

Fab shot Andrew,so much to look at.

[Andrew*]

Thanks Stewart, yes I was quite astonished at how much little nebulae and clusters pop up everywhere. On the full res I have totted up 48 DSOs!

Hi Andrew,

1. I selected the main areas of nebulosity and then inverted the selection to select everything but the nebulous regions and ran Gradient Xterminator on the image.

2. I produced a duplicate layer and enhanced the saturation.

3. I copied this layer to a new file, converted it to LAB mode and increased the contrast of the 'a' channel - this boosts just the red areas and then copied this image back on top of the original.

4. I duplicated this top layer and ran Noise Ninja on it to smooth the background a little and then adjusted the opacity of this final layer to about 75% to get some 'noise' back to ensure the detail remained.

Hi Steve, I've never even heard of most of the functions you've used, except GradXT, which I can't really afford ATM...

Are there tutorials for these kind of things available on the web somewhere?

Cheers

Andrew

[Greg]

Excellent Andrew... Well done a cracking capture.

Greg

[Nightfly]

Lots of goodies in this image. Your just starting to record the Witch Head Nebula to the west (right) of Rigel. That's a tough nut to crack. Well done.

[antimorris]

Great job! Nice to see so much in there as well as Barnard's Loop

[RogerTheDodger]

Great pic, I hope I can do half as good sometime soon

[MaCross]

One day I will be able to capture it as beautifully as you Andrew