Lovejoy, M45 with a D800 and polarie (yes - another..)

[alocky]

Friday night I set up the Polarie with the D800 Nikon and a 180mm f2.8 prime lens and let it go while Barry and I enjoyed a rare clear sky through our dobs.
Here's the result with the usual comet aligned and star aligned combination in pixinsight, and also the comet-aligned stack. There's some exquisite structure in the tail, and it seems the 180mm lens was a bit too long!
I've stuck a high res version on flickr with that annoying red background cast removed.
https://flic.kr/p/qyvZXF
cheers, and thanks for looking
Andrew

[andyc]

Very impressive!

[tel.lekatsas]

Mate, that is one of the best widefield images I've seen. The tail is magnificent!

[cometcatcher]

The Flicker version is awesome!

[John Hothersall]

Great HiRes detail on Flickr Andrew, tail structure is splendid.

John.

[dvj]

Exceptional work! Lovely composition. Andrew, can you explain the processes used to create this image?

jg

[plantnerd]

Excellent work I tried both 300mm and 100mm focal length equivalent lenses with F2.0 one being too long and the other too short your image is making me to to ebay to find a used 75mm f1.8 so I can cover the 150mm equivalent FL for situations like this. Will post my humble attempts soon Cheers

[alocky]

Thanks for your kind words! I appreciate it!



Hi John,
I used Pixinisght's batch processing script to apply flats, darks bias then debayer - 20 of each.
Then I used the star registration tool to align all the subs, then fed these into the comet align algorithm - so much easier to use than the first time I tried it 2 years ago! This is now so easy a muppet can do it!
Stacking is obviously the tricky part: In Pixinisght's integration tool I chose minimum combination (default is average), ran a linear fit pixel rejection (there were 28 subs) and set the linear fit low to about 2 s.d. and the high to 0.1 (very restrictive!)
Stacking each set of subs gives me the star field - with plenty of nebulosity, and the comet aligned stack (same parameters) did a fair job of cutting out the stars, although the nebulosity around the pleiades was subsequently edited in photoshop.
Then dynamic background removal, non-linear stretch,curves to increase saturation ( LAB space didn't help) SCNR and off to photoshop to sort out the colour balance and recombine the two images.
Let me know if you want any more detail on any of the steps.
cheers,
Andrew.

[RickS]

That's a lovely image, Andrew!

[iceman]

Beautiful work, Andrew. Lovely images.

[gregbradley]

That looks great.

Greg.

[Ross G]

Great looking photo Andrew.

Ross.