NGC 3372 - First Light

[Andy01]

Happy new Year Folks! :rofl:

This is a popular object amongst Astrophotographers, but it's my first real crack at it. Was up at 3 am to get the shot, but it's was worth it, although this is only 12 x 5 min. Dark skies make a real difference to shooting on the OSC SBIG 8300c and this one was taken on a perfect night in rural Victoria.

It's so big that this is only the centre portion, which is all I can fit on my camera with the WO FLT 110 combo. Maybe a reducer will be in the finance minister's budget this year, if I'm specially nice to her. :)

Thanks for looking, feel free to comment, I'm still learning :thumbsup:

Cheers

Andy

[gregbradley]

Sweet shot. Nice deep and rich colours.

Greg.

[astronobob]

Thats a mighty fine image Andrew :thumbsup:
I see you have a few targets in your collection now, just looking through them and have noticed that you a going forward in leaps, this image you have good handle on star coloring, really sets off any astro-image, also a nice ballance of luminance and Nebulosity across the entire frame, well done :thumbsup:
Nice, & looking forward to more . .

[RickS]

Very nice, Andy!

[cometcatcher]

Very nice, good colours.

[pfitzgerald]

Very nicely done Andy.

If I might ask, what processing steps did you use in your work flow, and how did you avoid blowing out the core?

Paul

[Andy01]

Cheers Greg, much appreciated! :thumbsup:



Wow thanks Astronobob! That's very encouraging feedback, should have another image up on the forum tmrw, all going well. :)



Cheers RickS, thanks for the feedback.:thanx:



Thanks Cometcatcher, much appreciated!



Hi Paul, ok here goes...
>Initial pre-processing and stacking in Nebulosity.
>colour offset
>DDP (digital development)
>tighten star edges
>adaptive medium noise reduction
>save as 16bit tiff -

open Photoshop.

>duplicate layer - the following are BW steps
>NIK filter Silver FX Pro BW layer (this is important) use blue filter so red areas don't blow out, save this BW layer in Luminance blend mode.
>adjustment layers curves & levels to suit. Luminance blend mode
>image adjust Noise reduction or Noise Ninja plug in

>place original duplicate layer on top in Colour blend mode, then apply the following colour steps

>adjustment layers hue saturation and colour balance adjust to suit
>NIK colour FX pro layer, adjust tonal contrast to suit
>NIK colour FX colour contrast layer, adjust to suit
>NIK colour FX Glamour Glow layer (terrible name I know!) adjust gently
>all colour layers in colour blend mode

>Astronomy tools action, Make stars smaller
>Astronomy tools action, Enhance DSO and dimmer stars
>Astronomy tools action, lighten DSO, save as layer 50% fill

>PS smart sharpen
>save as JPEG, 'phew, open a beer! :thumbsup:

Hope that helps... It's the BW luminance layers that give a great deal of control over the final outcome. :)

[tilbrook@rbe.ne]

Good first crack Andrew!:thumbsup:

Colour balance is good, another hour would make it perfect.

Cheers,

Justin.

[pfitzgerald]

Thanks heaps for the reply Andy.

I'm also using Nebulosity and PS CS5, so I'm looking forward to trying the steps in your work flow on some of my images.

In your Nebulosity workflow did you include the steps of: Normalize Intensities and Batch Demosaic + Square RAW color?

Finally, apart from Noise Ninja did you make use of any other PS plugins designed for astrophotography (I still have a little Christmas money left over - it might as well go to a good cause! :-) )

T.I.A.

Paul

[Andy01]

Thanks heaps Justin, I agree more data would be an improvement.



Hi Paul,
Yes, Normalize and Batch demosaic & Square Raw colour, I follow the steps in the Nebulosity manual and it works pretty well.:)

I also sometimes use NIK's DFine for noise reduction and NIK output sharpener for final adjustments. I highly recommend NIK filters (now cheap from google) and Astronomy Tools 1.6 (also cheap).

Cheers
Andy

[pfitzgerald]

Thanks Andy - I'll look into it this afternoon.

Very much appreciated!

Paul

[stevous67]

Hello Andy,

You're certainly getting the hang of it!

Your PS skills will really help you finish the job.

Great stuff; one of my favourite objects.

Regards
Steve

[Andy01]

Thanks Steve, really appreciate your positive feedback :)

Especially coming from experienced AP imagers like yourself. Guess there's light at the end of the tunnel after all! There's still a looooong way to go, but it's getting a little bit easier every time as I slowly eliminate mistake after mistake. At this rate, I'll probably master AP in say another 100 years!

Cheers
Andy

[Ross G]

A very good photo Andy.

Nice colour.

Good luck.

Ross.

[Andy01]

Thanks for your positive feedback Ross, much appreciated :)
Cheers
Andy