Rho Ophiuchi Cloud Complex

[dylan_odonnell]

Inspired by the featured shot on the iceinspace forums a few weeks back I tried this target. About a dozen 30" subs with a 18-55mm nikon kit lens piggybacked on an alt-az celestron fork mount. I completely neglected bias, darks, flats and tried to recover as much as I could through heavy post processing. I only got my nebulosity serial today and am super happy with the software, also some post-post in photoshop for logarithmic curves, levels and fixing light pollution from nearby streetlight. This was taken in my driveway.

Next time I'll be a bit more patient with the preprocessing frames and use a nicer lens, stopped down a touch.

And yeh, still totally freaked out by the "beginners" in this forum! Lots more practice required before my next post! :)

d

[cometcatcher]

Very nice pic Dylan!

Don't be intimidated by pics in the beginners section. We are all on the learning curve ladder.

[raymo]

Lovely.
raymo

[DavidU]

Excellent.:thumbsup:

[SimmoW]

Yes, a lovely pic. Try DSS for easy stacking and darks processing.

[andyc]

Definitely don't be intimidated, especially with a really nice starter like this one :thumbsup:. Looks just like a few of mine. If that's from your driveway, you have enviable skies, too! You already have a lot of the Rho Ophiuchi nebulosity showing up, so there's some good data there to work with.

[dylan_odonnell]

Thanks so much Raymo, Andy, Simmo and David! Am pretty happy with Nebulosity 3 for the stacking, just need to get my pre-process a bit better with bias, darks and flats. Here is the higher res version if anyone is interested : http://deography.com/images/RHO.jpg

[pluto]

Nice one Dylan!
And good to see you on IIS, much better looking at images here than on tiny Instagram :D

[dylan_odonnell]

Hah yes indeed @astrohugh! It's much easier to post in 512 x 512 where all my errors and distortions are invisible hehe. ;)

@dylan_odonnell_ for all the other IIS users on instagram.

Dylan.