M45 Pleiades - 113mins / Hyperstar / 2 cameras

[dylan_odonnell]

Hi all,

Here's this years poke at The Pleiades. I think I'm finally doing justice to my setup and am paying closer attention now to both acquisition and processing. I've added a comparison for my 2014 and 2015 attempts so you can see my journey.

This year I adjusted and fixed my cables in front of the hyperstar for better aligned diffraction spikes from those bright stars in the cluster, and used colour data from the QHY12 (one shot colour CCD) and Luminence data from the QHY9 (mono CCD) in a single session by changing cameras halfway through. Colour in 3m exposures and mono detail in 2m exposures, total 113 mins. It's a very quick way to get a colour image with the detail & clarity you'd expect from mono without having to shoot separate R/G/B or narrowband channels.

Higher resolution : http://deography.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/LRGB-Pleaides-1.jpg

Processing in Pixinsight and Photoshop CC.

d

[Placidus]

A pleasing image. Big improvement each year. Nice to see some yellow non-cluster stars in the image for contrast with the strong blue of the cluster.

[RickS]

It's a very difficult target and you've handled it well. With such a fast system it would be nice to see you go deeper and dig out some of the fainter stuff (I wonder whether you could bring out a bit more even with the current data?)

Cheers,
Rick.

[dylan_odonnell]

Yeh I am pushing the black point levels to hide my dirty flat-less data (hehe). But I've found the trade off with F2 imaging is if you go too deep the stars blowout and you lose the colour, which Mike (and trish) noticed I managed to get good separation of (thanks!) due in part to the conservative exposures. There is more if I stretch it harder, and you're right.. maybe I should try stretching more and masking the star colour back in with some careful processing .. mmmm. Thanks!

d

[dylan_odonnell]

Eeked a little more more luminosity out of the nebula regions. Thanks for idea!

[Atmos]

Looking pretty good Dylan!
Tiger the faint and bright material you may have to do two versions (faint and bright) and blend them together.