Antares Rho Ophiuchus

[Rowland]

This image was taken at the Snake Valley Camp last weekend. A very tight fit and mostly experimental. Two versions, subdued and contrasting?

The sub frames are a little under exposed and too few to really make things pop. A little StarTools magic (not the Magic module) teased out the detail, while doing a very good job on the noise.

Preprocessing in PI and post processing in StarTools, using the additional Luminance channel technique to allow further stretching of the colours.

The bias and dark frames are twelve months old and were taken with my regulated cooled Canon 1000D, at -5C. Pretty good consistency. The camera maintained -5C +/- 0.5C all night over the weekend.

Despite heavy dew both nights, the camera and scope ran dew free. It was a delight to see the dew controllers inside the camera and on the scope perform very well.

I have a bit to learn about keeping bright starts like Antares under control and I have a faint suspicion that several of the images may have been taken with the focus mask in place. Rather than discard them, I am prepared to put up with those big spikes emanating from Antares. But there is room for improvement.

[admin]

So much to see in this one! There is a huge dynamic range in that image.
These must've been fairly long exposures?

[Rowland]

150 and 180 seconds about 30% of the 35 subs. I have a bit of work to do on exposure times with this new (used) scope.

[Rowland]

Reworked - any suggestions on the noise?

[admin]

Lovely in its own right. As for noise, did you use 1.4 for this? Its noise reduction is more effective again...

[Rowland]

It is that!

I am using the alpha version and the noise reduction is phenomenal.

[AndyBooth]

Cracking pic mate, lovely colour balance

[Rowland]

Thanks Andy.