Ngc 3324

[xelasnave]

No excuses but the conditions were far from ideal last night but I managed I little time on NGC 3324 also known as The Gabriela Mistral Nebula.
Again because of clouds took the short exposures and high gain approach both to get something but the repetition of the procedure must help when the perfect night comes... it is amazing the silly small mistakes I make..I always forget to connect the camera to the lappy and when I turn on sharp cap get the horrors because there is no camera..thats one that catches me so often..not completing details to record the different subs is another..but thru constant repetition I am getting better.

Thru the neat little 80mm with the zwo cooled cam on heq 5 unguided exposures from 1 to 2 minutes and gain from 300 to 400... which is way past what is acceptable but I am finding I can make this approach work.

Deep Sky Stacker, Star Tools, Photo Shop ...hope it is not too saturated.

alex

[RyanJones]

I'm always so impressed with your images Alex and I love your " at any cost " attitude..... Light cloud.... Meh..... I'll just shoot through it !

Great stuff Alex !

If we're exposing our repetitive mistakes, you wouldn't believe the number of batteries I've gone though forgetting to turn my red dot finders off.

[Lognic04 (Logan)]

What a beauty alex!!! Love it - spectacular detail, and the colour palette is nice!

[Paulyman (Paul)]

Brilliant Alex, I love the colour.

[xelasnave]

Thank you gentlemen.

The colour is contrived.

With this one I showed my daughter a nice photo on the net and asked her to create a little pallet showing the background and predominate colours..this was done in photoshop ...just a solid colour page with the sky background colour of the net photo with little patches showing the other three colours..I could then create a solid colour in the particlular colour I wanted using the eyedropper type tool and creating a new solid colour layer..I then paste my black and white image over the solod colour and sparingly use the rubber tool to let a little colour thru...I end up with multiple partly coloured pages which I merge over and over until it looks ok...there were four including the background. I put the image together using those colours and checking with her to see if it looked ok until she became irritated so from there I was on my own but the process has given me a way of managing my colour blindness I hope.
She gave up on me when I could not get the blie correct afyer many attempts.
Understandable I can be tiresome.

I do find a stack of all data helps bring out detail.

I stack whatever I get all together ( ha rbg lum whatever☺) and use that result as a foundation to add each of the channels I may have one by one separately..red green etc..but usually I have to create false colour because I have no data for a particular channel...yes its all very wrong but it helps me learn and after all at this stage all I want is a pretty picture☺

Fake it until you make it has always been my moto and although some folk hate that approach I think there is a lot going for such an approach when you can only aspire to be a mug☺.

I didnot go out last night which is terrible because there was plenty of spaces between the clouds..a good night but wasted.

Thanks again.
Alex