Starless Lagoon and Trifid nebulae

[pkinchington]

I believe that the starless rendition of my Lagoon and Trifid nebulae yields a better image than one with stars. What do you think?

[PKay]

Hi Kanga

More like a water colour painting now ie: more on the 'arty' side.

Nothing wrong with that, I actually quite like it...

[MortonH]

Interesting but I think without the stars you lose context of what you're looking at.

[pkinchington]

Yes I am approaching it from the "arty" side. :)
P.S. Also the image is designed to be printed at 300dpi and will have less of a watercolour feel than at actual pixel size on the screen.

[pkinchington]

Hi Morton,
It does lose context but sometimes with my images I like a bit of mystery.
Cheers Kanga:)

[glend]

As long as your not representing it as astrophotography. I agree with the comment about context. Most people who do imaging strive for realism, well as much as narrowband can approximate. If you consider what the Lagoon might actually look like if you were out in space near it, I would be willing to bet that the stars involved would be the primary feature you could observe.

[pkinchington]

Hi Glen,
I believe that in any photography particularly "scientific" disciplines. What is important is to state the procedure that was followed. In this case I used an unmodified mirrorless camera and removed the stars in post processing. One could argue that the colours of the nebula have been rendered more realistic than in narrowband imaging. However if you state the procedure/component wavelength subs used and the subsequent mapping of the colours to the RGB channels then a narrowband image still has validity. When I initially processed my image that was taken at a dark site there were so many stars that I feel that they overwhelmed the image. This is why I also produced the starless version.
Cheers Kanga :)

[Nikolas]

It's not so much the lack of stars but the lack of detail in the image which is what I think others are trying to portray. As a watercolour it's brilliant but I don't think the detail in the nebulas is there to say it's an astrophoto.
YMMV

[pkinchington]

Hi Nick,

I probably shouldn't have applied a median filter. Also I think narrowband does bring out nebulosity more and there is more delineation because of the separation between each of the transmitted wavelengths of the filters.
Cheers Kanga

[Nikolas]

For sure the narrowband filters do a superlative job.

[jahnpahwa]

Peter, this is a nice image, and cool that you've got the starless tool in the bag, but the thing I liked most about your other version was that you were starting to show the rich starfield of the area. I thought it was a really, really nice rendition :thumbsup: