Eta Carina (again)

[LightningNZ]

Eta Carina Nebula (again).

Don't look too closely at the trailed stars. This was a quick test of the Nikon D5100 to see how it compares to my old camera, taken through the light pollution of urban Canberra.

Colour reproduction is fantastic (though I've abused it a little here) and it's very sensitive/low noise compared to the Canon 300D. Really keen to get it astro-modified at some point and boost the sensitivity further still.

25 minutes of 30-second exposures at ISO 400 with Nikon D5100 on AT65-EDQ. Flats-field corrected but no dark or bias frames. This is a cropped frame. Processed (rather hurriedly) in Adobe PhotoShop.

Cheers,
Cam

[ZeroID]

Plenty of colour for sure. Did you process the LP out or any filter used ?

[nebulosity.]

Nice work Cam, I am very interested in getting the D5100 and wondered how the noise was, pretty good by the looks of your image.

Cheers
Jo

[LightningNZ]

I don't have a filter and I made no attempt to remove gradients. All I did was pull out some green from the middle part of the histogram with a Curves operation. It doesn't have the red of a modified camera and maybe I pushed the red just a bit too far in this one but I wanted to see how well it'd hold up.



Thanks Jo. I'd seen a few people over at CloudyNights say it was the APS-c camera to get. I think I agree with them now. :) Considering I made no attempt to take darks or bias images this is really very pleasing. I was impressed with how far I could abuse the image in PhotoShop (and how easy it made processing) compared to the old 300D.