M 16

[Stefan B]

Hi Dietmar,

And I thought this was be a snapshot taken with your smartphone . Usually I’m not that naive A great image, I too will try to do something like that.

That would be great if my smartphone snapshots looked like that! But yes, I really like the image, too. Probably will even print and hang it somewhere

Making the image was pretty straightforward. For stacking I used sequator and Microsoft ICE for stitching. Both free. So give it a try. Or use a widefield lense with full frame camera...but I have neither. So my APS-C DSLR and a 24 mm lense had to do the trick.

Your contribution to the low dec challenge looks promising. These southern Messier targets are so bright even we in Germany can get nice results

Regards
Stefan

[Mike in Rancho]

Nice stuff Stefan and Dietmar! You guys inspired me to get out my static tripod and f/s Nikon a couple nights back. Sadly, my artistic talent wasn't so inspired, as you will soon see!

I haven't tried for the MW in three years. Which was also the last time I used Sequator, so I couldn't quite remember what settings I wanted to use. Anyway, I first set up in my "low South target" backyard spot where I've picked up Om Cent and Cent A before, and then took it over to and behind my side yard usual imaging spot. The scope was actually working on Sh2-115 at the time. 10 shots of 8 seconds each, so 1.3m integration.

The LP and gradient were just brutal. In fact I could do little to nothing with it, at least manually. So I figured only Wipe could pull this off, and it actually performed pretty well. Only problem was the tendency to "back off," even with a fancy mask set. If that could only be disabled, ST would really help me make some backyard MW landscapes! The shot with the more complicated trees and wires was the worst, not so bad on the other.

Here's the first one with all the bad Wipe "back off," and I still couldn't wash a lot of that out even after using a very fuzzed Layer with mask against a version that was just binned, rotated, and sorta (or sorta not) color matched. Not sure where the teapot is, I never even knew there was a teapot. I picked up some decently antipodal stars here, though I think more could be seen if not for the nuclear glow around everything.

South1TryAgain blended.jpg (320.5 KiB) Viewed 2802 times

Same procedure here but Wipe behaved better with the terrestrial anomalies. The mask was simpler too. You can see just how much stuff I have in the way for Southern targets -- telephone wires and palm fronds!

South2 blended2.jpg (355.03 KiB) Viewed 2802 times

The Lagoon seems fairly obvious, anyway. I'll have to get out Stellarium to try to identify other MW things.

So that's my sky contribution. Not nearly so dark and pretty as the European versions, but hey at least something showed up! Not bad for 80 seconds in Bortle 8 I guess.

[decay]

Nice, Mike Excellent job for Bortle 8, I guess ... I like these wide field images featuring foreground objects. Unfortunately processing with local contrast enhancement or similar results in these bright borders sitting next to the dark foreground objects.

2023-07-30 18_55_34-M 16 - Page 2 - StarTools – Mozilla Firefox.jpg (78.86 KiB) Viewed 2783 times

The teapot is a rather dominant constellation, as I know, having been on holiday near the Alps in the past. I like the term 'teapot' (mostly used by Anglo-Saxon speakers AFAIK) - simply because it looks more like this than like an 'archer' And I always forget how far south L.A. is located:

2023-07-30 20_11_24-Window.jpg (92.02 KiB) Viewed 2783 times

(WikiMedia)

So the teapot is much higher in the sky for you. The upper red line is where Freddy and I live. Stefan lives a few 100 km to the south. He's the only one of us, who has a significantly darker sky, I think.

Best regards, Dietmar.

[Mike in Rancho]

Thanks Dietmar, and nice annotations.

For sure kind of cool identifying things like the Sag star cloud.

I actually didn't use any modules other than bin rotate wipe filmdev and color, meaning no enhancing like contrast. So the key is really trying to get the wipe to work, and on the one image it didn't down near the landscape features, despite really upping the IFD and other fiddling.

Oh and I guess the layer blend too. Palm trees are really a PITA to mask, but there's so much fuzz used anyway for the wires to look right. Maybe it's mostly my lack of sky color matching that hurts things too.

Anyway, even if I have to set the mount up back where I took that picture, it seems M16 might be feasible (though I haven't sketched out whether my focal length is really too short).

[Stefan B]

Hehe, nice I could inspire a bit of MW imaging

Great images, Mike. Wouldn't have thought that this was possible at all with Bortle 8. And the cool stuff looks pretty high up. Was there any kind of LP filter involved?

Regards
Stefan