Sh2-308 (near EZ CMa) first try

[skysurfer]

Thursday night I tried to capture this very faint nebula near the star Omicron CMa (the orange star in the middle) and the fainter bluish Wolf-Rayet EZ CMa. The very faint blue nebula is barely visible as a crescent to left bottom from the orange star.
I exposed 15x3 minutes using the Canon 6D on the ED110 prime focus. I cropped the result to about APS-C size.


Postprocessing with Photoshop was not easy due to the gradients, it was a bit misty and light polluted, not the best combination, in Wyee (near Newcastle), so not the best sky.


I found this site (https://astrobackyard.com/remove-gradients-photoshop/) how to handle these gradients.


And the setup during the imaging using a bag with stones as makeshift counterweight.

[Geoff45]

Have you tried Gradient Exterminator http://www.rc-astro.com/resources/GradientXTerminator/
It’s a photoshop plugin that works pretty well.
What happened to the stars? The bright ones have rings around them.

[skysurfer]

I used purple fringing correction to correct the blue halos, but I used it too strongly, hence the white halos.