Not bad at all when it comes to the signal you captured! I hope the new color module can further help with the colors this season.
The 7 sisters are buggers in that they are really bright compared to the nebulosity, so what you got here doesn't strike me as atypical at all. In fact you got them under control rather well here, seeing as you can clearly see the diffraction pattern around the stars, meaning you tried (and succeeded) in bringing out as much detail as possible without blowing them out any further.
So, yes, shorter exposures for the stars and layering them in with the HDR filters in the Layer module is definitely an option. Not a crazy idea at all! Some imagers with CCDs find that their CCDs start exhibiting blooming due to the extremely bright stars, so they do something along similar lines.
Focus and seeing appear to be good in this image (they can blow stars out as well relative to other detail that is not overexposed). Atmospheric transparency can also cause problems of this nature.
Would love to hear how you go with this!
Ivo Jager StarTools creator and astronomy enthusiast
No worries. Every time I looked at a Pleiades pic/data the past few days I compared it mentally to what you posted here and, trust me, your image stacks up well!
Ivo Jager StarTools creator and astronomy enthusiast
admin wrote:No worries. Every time I looked at a Pleiades pic/data the past few days I compared it mentally to what you posted here and, trust me, your image stacks up well!
Yes nice one Andy, from a local Notts lad.
I found it rather a pain trying to tease the luminosity out of the image, but that was
with CS3. I'm new to StarTools and I'm struggling to grasp the concepts. Always a steep
learning curve to start with, but the videos are certainly helping.
