Mate! Astrofest

[Garbz]

Another Astrofest shot. M8

I am never happy trying to process a picture in a dense starfield. I just ... I don't know. I almost think this looks better when light pollution blocks the milky way.

Anyway:
QHY10, Meade ED80, 3.5hours at 5min subs.

And a full resolution copy at only 2.8MB:
http://www.garbz.com/dump/M8.jpg

/EDIT: Now with a repo with a more blue colour balance.

[peter_4059]

That looks great Chris. So many stars and so much going on in that field of view. I guess you could try shooting that one from Rotterdam if you want less stars :)

[Atmos]

Looking good! I guess you could also just try shining a torch near the front of the telescope, bit of nasty scattering goes a long way to destroying some data if you want to go down that path ;)

[Placidus]

I really extra ultra like the warm rich colours given by the star field.

Crispy sharp focus.

A very pleasant image. Well done.

[multiweb]

M888888te!!! Nope. That's a perfect lagoon fov. The sandy milkyway, star colours, details in the nebulosity and red and pink hues. You've nailed it! :thumbsup::thumbsup::thumbsup:

[RobF]

Beautiful work Chris. Love your FOV with that camera/scope combo.

If I really try hard to suggest a tweak, might be for a tad more blue (or at least blue saturation) in the colour balance.

Otherwise, probably only 11/10 for the overall score :P

[topheart]

Nice composition and great work.

Thanks,
Tim

[Camelopardalis]

That's a beauty Chris :thumbsup: such a great region of sky :D

[MortonH]

Perfect framing. Gr8 result! :thumbsup:

[Garbz]

Thanks all.

I just posted a repo with a more blue colour balance. Did this by eye instead of trusting the colour balance routine to get it right. What do you think? Yay or Neigh?



Thanks. Check out the Repo I posted above. It does feel a bit better with more blue. The nebula is a bit less intense, but one thing I wasn't able to do was increase the blue saturation. That just resulted in stars that looked plain weird. Let me know what you think.

[troypiggo]

Sorry I missed this first time. Looks good, m8. Tiny nitpick - full sized image stars show morph transf erosion bit much?

[Garbz]

This is why I don't like posting full sized versions :P

It's a battle of two ideals. The smaller sized picture looks much better with severe erosion, the full size looks better with minimal erosion. I need a bait and switch option :lol:

[Atmos]

Large image with a lot of JPG compression :lol:

[RobF]

Like the slight blue addition version. Its great data and a great pic.

[alpal]

Hi Chris,
that's such a beautiful image.
I think I would have changed the contrast selectively
at the center of M8 like this - I hope you don't mind?
It brings out the darker areas at the center a little more.

cheers
Allan

[troypiggo]

Haha. Warts and all is best I reckon. Did it need the erosion in the first place?

[Garbz]

Yes. Not all of us have brilliant optics that can help keep a big starfield under control :P

[RickS]

Looks great, Chris, but maybe a bit more care with the star masks? You can apply a fair amount of MT if you do it incrementally.

Cheers,
Rick.

[Slawomir]

Very nice image Chris, maybe a tad too green/yellow/mustard...?:question:

[Garbz]

Thanks Rick. I'll see if I can fine tune it. The star-masks I was working with either failed to pick up the sea of background stars, or generated a mask that included the sea but then was almost completely white. Maybe I'll just back the whole thing off a bit.

Slawomir I was confused by what you said but then looking at it on my work monitor it does seem a tad green. I wonder if that's something to do with the calibration on my laptop.... I may just wait until I get my desktop computer shipped over here before I work on this any further.

[Slawomir]

Or it might be my iPad? Anyway, a great image, but in general I prefer rich tomato salsa over spicy mustard in astro images ;)

[strongmanmike]

Quite a lovely Lagoon image that Chris, I like the broad sweeping panorama framing too, nice work :thumbsup:

Mike