Collection of Critters

[Mickoid (Michael)]

There are a lot of animals overhead this time of year and I decided to seek some of them out and take a snapshot.

The popular Eagle nebula was something I tried last year with a 4 inch refractor and despite it being a nice widefield, you just couldn't see enough detail to make it interesting. Friday night I shot it from the outskirts of Melbourne with a 1000mm of focal length to enhance it's central region.

So this M16 is a stack of 50 x 1min at 800iso, cropped a little to remove distracting stars.

M8 was a stack of 15 subs at 800 iso. 10 x 1 min from my suburban front yard about a week ago and another 5 x 1 min with a CLS filter to finish off the night after I shot M16. A total of 15 minutes.

The Prawn, Cat's Paw and Lobster were from my suburban front yard using a Sigma 50 - 200mm lens @ 200mm and were made up of a combination of UVIR and CLS CCD filters, 20mins for each. The Cat's Paw and Lobster didn't turn out very well from this Light Polluted location. I had to stretch the histogram a fair bit to give some definition to the nebulas, hence the resulting graininess.

Saturn was just a try at RGB imaging with the ZWO 120MM-S under atrocious seeing, I was surprised the result even looks like Saturn! This was my first attempt at imaging Saturn this way.

All deep sky shots were taken with the Modded Canon 550d.

[Saturnine (Jeff)]

The images look fine to me, could always be said that longer imaging time , better conditions , different focal lengths etc etc would produce better results but you get what you get at the time and can't begrudge what you have captured there. Would have to be reasonably satisfied I reckon.

[Ant0nio (Tony)]

M16 is looking pretty good for only 50mins, the pillars are nicely defined & did I get the math right, only 25mins for M8? It's a very pleasing image for that amount of data.
Nice job on the processing Mick, the star colours in M8 are excellent. The first two critters get my vote.
Well done.
Ant.

[Mickoid (Michael)]

Originally Posted by Saturnine

The images look fine to me, could always be said that longer imaging time , better conditions , different focal lengths etc etc would produce better results but you get what you get at the time and can't begrudge what you have captured there. Would have to be reasonably satisfied I reckon.

You're right Jeff, thanks for the comments. I do think I'm always making excuses for the pictures I post. I guess it's a very rare occasion that I'm completely satisfied with everything that happened on the night. The satisfaction is in capturing the target you had planned to photograph and achieving that. This I did on Friday night, I should be grateful it was a clear night which gave me that opportunity.

Originally Posted by Ant0nio

M16 is looking pretty good for only 50mins, the pillars are nicely defined & did I get the math right, only 25mins for M8? It's a very pleasing image for that amount of data.
Nice job on the processing Mick, the star colours in M8 are excellent. The first two critters get my vote.
Well done.
Ant.

Thanks Tony, my exposure details were a little confusing, M8 was only a total of 15mins exposure. I have now simplified these exposure details in an edit to my original post.

[xelasnave]

Nice critters
Alex

[Anth10 (Anthony M)]

Mick,
A nice assortment of creatures here. The Eagle has come up a treat- the pillars are really prominent, cats paw also. Trying to achieve the perfect shot which is always our intention requires plenty of things to go right. If we can manage the best of what we’ve got then generally the image is more than satisfactory. You seem to tick all the box’s on the majority of occasions. Well done for posting all of your efforts they are well worth it- great skill to produce such.
Saturn is nice - we shall have more chances soon as it reaches opposition...
Anth

[Mickoid (Michael)]

Thanks for your compliments and comments Alex and Anthony.