M42 and Running Man Nebula

[Geoff45]

Hi all
I took this picture over the weekend down at Ilford (near Mudgee).
Exposure: 5 x 5min plus 10 x 30s
Camera: Canon 350D unmodified.
Scope: 110 mm refractor.

[Ric]

Very nice image Geoff, lots of detail in that image.
The running man really stands out.

great stuff

[Striker]

Nice one Geoff,

Looks a bit over processed to me but still well done.

[iceman]

Great image Geoff, but it's suffering badly from compression artifacts.

Can you resize it to a lower res, before saving to web? That would get rid of some of the nasties.

I love it otherwise.

[h0ughy]

nice image, abit of CA colour there around a few stars, what refractor do you have? apart from that, its a lovely image! Well done, i would be over the moon with a result like that!

[davidpretorius]

awesome, well done

[spearo]

well done
looks great
nice round stars-excellent tracking
core isnt burnt out
well done
lovely composition too
frank

[seeker372011]

liked it when I saw it earlier this morning and like it sjust as much second time around..what scope and mount BTW?

[allan gould]

Lovely shot. Captured the nebulosity around both nebula. There is a lot of detail in the shot but none of how it was taken.
Details please.

[atalas]

Nice shot Geoff.

[smersh]

Good result Geoff - and I only heard one night of swearing! ;)

[Lester]

Excellent image Geof.

[jase]

Great shot Geoff. Nice image processing techniques too.

[Phil]

love the photo nice detail great work

[asimov]

Lovely image, well done.

[Geoff45]

Scope was a WO Zenithstar 110mm. Mount was a Losmandy GM8. All exposures were manually guided using a skywatcher 70mm refractor piggybacked on the main scope. Camera was an unmodified Canon 350D at prime focus. Focusing was done with ImagesPlus, while camera control used the Canon TC-80N3 remote control, modified by Hutech to work with the 350D. You can use it to automate the length of exposure, the number of exposures, and the gap between them. I prefer doing this than letting the computer control the camera. (Computer sometimes hangs up in the middle of a sequence--most frustrating). The 5 x five min subs and 10 x 30 sec subs were dark frame calibrated and separately combined into two light frames, all using ImagesPlus. The remainder of the processing was done in Photoshop on each image--Levels, curves etc. To get rid of the overexposed core, you have to paste the short exposure as a layer onto the long exposure, so the long exposure is the background layer, while the short exposure is layer 1. You then make a layer mask for layer 1 from the long exposure, which if you get things right, blocks off the overexposed core of the long exposure and replaces it with the short exposure. This process is well described in Jerry lodriguss's ebook "A guide to astrophotography with digital SLR cameras" (See http://www.astropix.com/GADC/GADC.HTM )
Geoff

[allan gould]

Great, thanks for that detail. It helps to see where you can improve processing as well as accumulating the images to do better. Thanks for all that effort and again a great shot.

[Octane]

Geoff,

Splendid work. Especially for manual guiding! Hats off to you.

Regards,
Humayun