First DSO (M42 re-edited)

[stan26]

Hi folks,

A few days ago I posted my first ever DSO capture, the M42. I was chuffed to bit's to see what detail and colour I could pull out of the image using my very limited knowledge on photo editing. Although I know the next stage for me is getting as much data as poss and to master stacking with darks etc, I knew I could do more with my single 30 sec shot, so after a mate installed photoshop CS2 on my pc and gave me a quick tutorial I decided to have ago. The main challenge was to try and get rid of the awful purple halo's caused by my F5 ST102.

I have attached the new edited pic. Its still the same single 30sec ISO3200 shot taken through my ST102 prime focus using an unmodded canon 500D, all mounted on an EQ3-2 with motor drive. polar aligned via polar scope!

My first attemp using GIMP is here.

http://stargazerslounge.com/imaging-deep-sky/133135-first-astro-pic-stan.html

Editing is still very new to me. I use the front cover picture of the book "making every photon count" to try and gauge what M42 should look like. I'm really happy with the results considering.

Stan.

M42 net 2nd attemp..tif

[stan26]

finally worked out how to put up a pic via a host site

[cloudbuster]

Loving this colourful pic...well done!

[Jannis]

Looks very good, almost hard to belive that's a single 30 sec sub!

[AndyUK]

The front cover of my "Making every photon count" is quite faded now, but I reckon I could print yours out, recover it and no-one would know the difference! Amazing result for one single 30s frame at ISO 3200 .

(Sort of makes me question why I actually needed to buy a guidecam, ED doublet and modded DSLR... and only use my ST102 as a guidescope )

[RogerTheDodger]

Amazing result

[bcsman]

brilliant pic

[steppenwolf]

This is a lovely image, nice subtle colours and well processed. You.ve done a great job of getting rid of the halos.

[stan26]

Thankyou all for you kind words!

For anyone who is interested, Starting with the halo's, I tried various methods to get rid of them inc a "purple fringe" pluggin I downloaded for GIMP, but all returned poor results. So In the end I used a rather more crude method in photoshop, the clone tool. I used this tool to blend out the purple halo's one by one. It took a while, but its effective.

After some tweaks in curves/levels/balance I saved the pic and then created a very saturated/red bias version. I saved this as my saturated base version and then loaded the original (pre saturated) version as a 2nd layer in PS. I aligned the two layers with the saturated vesion on the bottom and then created a layer mask. Using the brush tool I then blended the M42's outer regions of the top layer with the bottom saturated layer to start to bring through the red gas. I done a simular thing with the running man. After this I done a final tweak in curves/levels and flattened the layers. And thats it!

Thanks

Stan.

[gary1968]

OMG, 30 secs, you should be well pleased. The colours to me are spot on and you have done a great job processsing, well done.

gary