[PRejto (Peter)]

I'm wondering if some of you experienced imagers might be able to tell me why I am able to get plenty of colour in photos of the Helix nebula, but not in the stars?

Using my TEC140/Moravian G2-8300 camera my image scale is 1.14 arcsec. I've not collected a huge amount of data.....5 min sub frames of 1 hour each in RGB + L using the Hutech IDAS. The nebula has good colour, but even completely over saturating to the point of destroying colour in the nebula hardly generates any star color. I've binned 2x2 for RGB, then processed in CCDStack, and used the mean combined stacks to generate a colour image.

I suppose a problem that might be related is that the DDP stretched images look pretty good (except minus star colour), but if I try to open an unstretched image in Photoshop I really cannot generate a useable colour image using levels; there appears to be very little usable signal...so little in fact that the entire image seems compressed into a single vertical line in the histogram. If, however, I save the image stretched by DDP, etc, that image looks fine in Photoshop, though somewhat noisy.

Are all of these issues just due to not enough sub exposre time, either lengths of sub frames, and or the total # of subs?

Thanks for any help!
Peter