Success!!! My best Horsehead so far...

[MGTechDVP]

Hi All,


Just sharing my latest Horsehead Nebula pic, my best Horsehead nebula to date.



I spent 4 days across October collecting long subs of the Horsehead nebula at a lower ISO setting on the modded Canon 40D.


I'm very happy with the result I ended up with.


Total exposure time was 10 hours 26 minutes and 40 seconds.


Baader H-Alpha 7nm filter
8 x 1800s subs at ISO400
5 x 1500s subs at ISO400
5 x 900s subs at ISO500
6 x 900s subs at ISO800


Color through Baader Neodumium
9 x 300s at ISO1000
5 x 600s at ISO400
1 x 70s at ISO3200
1 x 30s at ISO3200




Thanks for looking,


Mariusz

[raymo]

Just lovely, Mariusz, but IMHO should be in the main forum.
raymo

[cometcatcher]

Great stuff Mariusz! Wow 30 minute subs. The longest I've taken with digital is 10 minutes. Need cool weather to do it too.

[ZeroID]

Yup, you're outa here, banned. Go play with the big boys :lol:

Nice pics Mariusz, excellent work.
Is the camera cooled ? 30 min exposures just are not feasible in my location.

[LightningNZ]

30 minute subs - that man deserves a beer!

Looks like there's still a fair bit of processing work that could be done. You might want to check out Starizona's HaRGB method for not washing out the colours with Ha. There's clearly some star image masking/blending you can do to improve the star images too, but it looks like you've nail the data collection side of things. Well done!

[Camelopardalis]

Wow, nice one Mariusz :thumbsup:

[cometcatcher]

Is your 40D cooled?

[BruceG]

Spectacular result ! Bravo!!

[Rex]

Beautiful Mariusz, the detail in the curtain is superb! Very well done.

[MGTechDVP]

Thank you for the awesome and encouraging feedback guys...

Kevin and Brent, my 40D is not cooled, it is only astro modded. When the 30 minute subs finish the sensor temperature was reported as 25 - 26 degrees... and yes there was a lot of noise. There is something that I did discover recently... If you open the CR2 raw files in photoshop, CS4 is my version... the RAW decoder plugin does a very good job at removing just the noise. and I use CS4 raw plugin to convert all of the CR2 files to 16 bit TIFF. Once converted I created a "Action Plan" in photoshop to copy the Red Channel to Green and Blue channels and sharpen the subs using Unsharp mask set at 2.5 pixels and 35%, then save it. This is for the HAplha subs since red channel is the only one that has data, the other channels are just black with nothing by noise... by the time this procedure get done the sub is noise free. The Color subs are treated the same except the RGB channels are left as is.

The Grayscale converted TIFF subs can be dark subtracted, but I imagine you would have to do the same action plan on the darks or you'll be subtracting noise that isn't there anymore...

I want to note here that I didn't dark subtract or apply flats to this image subs... I didn't see the need to dark subtract since like I said the subs were very noise free and I just cropped out the vignetting.

So Brent and Kevin, I think you'll find that going over 10 minutes is quite safe and possible, but only through narrowband filters I suspect, at my location anything without a NB filter will washout within 10 minutes too.

Brent and Raymo I still don't think I belong with the big boys yet, not after seeing some of the gold they are posting.

The subs were then stacked in Nebulosity 3 and the end result was slightly adjusted in photoshop using curves... I didn't adjust it much, I didn't need to, the nebula was already smooth, detailed and bright.

I'm working on the Orion Nebula now but this time I will apply flat mapping... but I don't think I'll need to do any darks... I already did 4 x 30 minute halpha subs on it and the above procedure worked out exactly the same, very noise free. I'll do an experiment by capturing subs in Ha, OIII and Hbeta... then Combine them as HaOIIIHb (RGB), should be close to true color but with Narrowband detail... I know it says online that HBeta is not intended for photography but I'm thinking, why not, Its basically Blue with out the spill into green, like OIII is closer to green but with out the spill, like Halpha is Red etc... Only experimenting will show if this works... If not then I'll spend a night or 2 capturing SII and make a Hubble Palette image and a NB Luminance mapped RGB.

Cam, thanks for the tip with HaRGB processing, will definitely have a go at it... oh and that beer you claim I deserve, I'll remind you at the next IISAC...:lol:

[Mckechg]

Totally agree - if this is beginning I am screwed!!! :-)

[MGTechDVP]

Goodness, starting to sound like I'm getting evicted from the beginner astrophotography community.. :shrug: ;) :D.. but that feedback is great, since that make me feel like I achieved pictures that are an improvement over my last ones...

If you guys think that my pics are good enough for the main photography section, I'll start posting there... starting with the Orion Nebula I'm working on now...

So far I only have HAlpha and Sulfur II subs... all were 30 minute subs, ISO 200 (about 4.5 hours worth for each filter) but also 8 x 5 min subs in HAlpha for the core.

I could get away with imaging that spectrum in and around full moon but for OIII and HBeta I'll have to wait for a moonless night since 486NM and 501nm are nearly slap bang in the middle of what the moon reflects/glows in...

Here's what I have so far but the final will go to the deep space section.

Pics are the HAlpha Channel, the SII and HAlpha and R & G with B left with nothing and the last is SII and Halpha but R & G channels reversed. Also a bit of Color balancing and Hue adjustment in PS.

Thanks for looking and the great feedback...

Mariusz