StarTools

I've wanted to shoot this for more than a year. Well, the NA anyway, didn't know until much later that there was a Pelican too.

Before I even had ST, a NA Neb YT tutorial in Gimp was my introduction to post-processing. I tried to point my (stock) Nikon at it, and understandably ended up with nothing.

Now I still don't have a wide field scope, but I do have my camera lenses. All zooms, but such is life. I managed to rig my f/s Nikon side by side on a dovetail with the guidescope, and used some step-down rings on a Tamron 70-300 in order to attach the 2" L-eNhance. Alignment and focus were a lot more difficult than with the big scope, but I managed. And was happily surprised when I ended up with some real NA Nebula and Pelican shapes on my screen after initial AutoDev. Yay.

It was just a one night stand, bored and looking for quick but interesting targets before the next monthly starts up again. 3 hours total integration, f/s D5300, Tamron zoom @300mm, f/5.6 (wide open), 240s ISO400. 30 flats, master bias, DSS.

The stars all had awful coma, of course, and I blew out the brightest (lots of bright stars here) despite being quite low on the histogram, but stacking and then ST managed to reign them in pretty well. I used SVD with a strong deringing and some spatial error, and then ran shrink also with deringing which filled in any remaining gaps left over.

Done in H(H+O)O, with a healthy dose of saturation, and throttled the Ha to show the OIII. Or really, the OIII+Hb. Who knows which this is...

Maybe too much blue? Can of course keep playing with it. It's not real deep and of course just a camera lens, but I was happy nonetheless.

In referencing this capture in another thread, I realized I never updated this post with some refined processing. Unless I uploaded them somewhere else here and forgot. Anyway, less stretch, not quite so harsh, and overall perhaps better suited to the dubious quality of the data. These were done a few days after the initial post above.

Similarly applied to both an HOO and H(H+O)O.

And yes, this was the last time I've been out there with the camera lens. The f/4 Newt arrived shortly thereafter.

Mike,
I don’t know these objects being from the southern hemisphere but you’ve certainly exposed some good detail irrespective of issues with the Stars. The HOO and HHOO blends are really impressive too.
What do you use to find objects in the night sky ?
Ive used Stellarium for many years both for visual observing with my 12” Goto dob and for telescope control with EQMOD with my array of Newts. An excellent planetarium.
Always interesting to image new objects for the first time

Well done !!

Clear Skies
Martin

Would it be uncouth of me to prefer the first version? The second processing loses so much of the Ha that it doesn't look much like North America any more. Of course there might be more subtle technical reasons to process the second way, but from a 'stand back and look at the overall picture' point of view, the original looks "more correct" to me.

Startrek wrote: ↑Sat Oct 22, 2022 9:44 am Mike,
I don’t know these objects being from the southern hemisphere but you’ve certainly exposed some good detail irrespective of issues with the Stars. The HOO and HHOO blends are really impressive too.
What do you use to find objects in the night sky ?
Ive used Stellarium for many years both for visual observing with my 12” Goto dob and for telescope control with EQMOD with my array of Newts. An excellent planetarium.
Always interesting to image new objects for the first time

Well done !!

Clear Skies
Martin

Thanks, Martin.

They are pretty well known objects and very frequently imaged, so hard to miss. Although as Ron says, mine might not be recognizable.

I too use Stellarium most of the time for object research, sizing up field of view and rotation, but always just as preparatory work. I can link my mount to Stellarium, and have done test slews with it in the living room, but I've never used it that way for real outside. Likewise with NINA, where I have Stellarium as my planetarium but have just used NINA's own framing wizard instead.

I believe it would be handy for visual nights - and I need to do some of those more often.

Depending on how far "under" you are, at +44 DEC it could be a doable horizon-skimmer, sort of like my captures of Cent A and Omega Centauri. If you're into that sort of thing.

dx_ron wrote: ↑Sat Oct 22, 2022 5:33 pm Would it be uncouth of me to prefer the first version? The second processing loses so much of the Ha that it doesn't look much like North America any more. Of course there might be more subtle technical reasons to process the second way, but from a 'stand back and look at the overall picture' point of view, the original looks "more correct" to me.

No, that's a valid critique. A year ago I had put the data up on CN, and DerekSC rendered a version that I thought was pretty nice, so I attempted to replicate that style. It's obviously softer, a bit glassy, far less stretched, and more muted overall. The goal was a little more emphasis on the dark streaky shadows, to show some good outer space background, and allow the Cygnus Wall to stand out more. Not stand out as in brighter, but as in the eye gets drawn to it.

The initial version just seemed too patchy and cartoonish, perhaps, and also gets rather noisy in the low SNR regions. Of course that assumes I have high SNR regions, and I'm not sure that's the case.

I don't want to say the later versions seemed more natural (what is natural in long exposure astrophotography anyway? other than a proper color balance in broadband), but they seemed more "right" to me for the data.

Maybe something in the middle...if the data can handle it. And balancing more back towards the Ha would probably help accomplish that, at the loss of some of the blue/white.

But really, if I ever get my new collimation toolkit (UPS seems to have misplaced my package somewheres), I want to try some Wall and/or Pelican with a real scope too.