M45 Pleiades (Merope nebula)

[ChrisLX200]

This is an RGB image taken tonight under a near-full moon (yes I know, I'm mad...). Trouble was the moon was sat on top of most of the other objects I'm currently imaging, well I have never imaged M45 before so thought I'd give it a shot. The result was some fairly noisy data (10 x 300s each channel R, G, and B) and high background levels. After stacking in DSS (then for each channel) I performed an autostretch to visualise the data, then cropped (20pxl per side), then used develop until it reached equilibrium (keep pressing Home-in button). Then I ran a Wipe (512x512 precision) followed by another global develop, then created a star mask. I used Auto for the star mask but then these fat stars needed personal attention to mask them out. Then I used Deconvolve (2pxl radius, 16 iterations, 7.0pxl mask fuzz). That was all - after that I stopped tracking and de-noised. After doing this for each channel I used AstroArt5 to register the frames, then back into StarTools and used LRGB composition to combine the RGB. A few tweaks with brightness and colour and the image is complete as you see here.

ChrisH

[admin]

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Those bright stars are hard to keep under control. Did you have any problems with that?

[ChrisLX200]

Like!

Those bright stars are hard to keep under control. Did you have any problems with that?

Thanks Ivo, there was not much I could do with the major stars so I just masked them out and left them as they were while applying decon to the nebulous stuff. It was not a good night to be doing this anyway so I was pleased to get anything!

ChrisH