RCW 57E (Ugly name -- Pretty Nebula)

[Alchemy]

RWC 57E is just below eta carinae, this is the eastern section.
i was going to hold on to this for a while but decided it might be of interest from a processing point of view, ive been working on some techniques to separate the item of interest from other stuff, this was the seventh try before i got one that worked reasonably well.

everyone has there own way of doing the processing thing, but i dont see much of the before/after so dont really know how effective that persons processing has been. ive included the stacked out of DSS image and the finished item at the same scale so you can compare if you want to.

this is a stack of 12 6min exposures at 800 iso with a cannon 300d modded, 12 inch newt, no filters other than uv/ir. i had more exposures but culled out those with movement as the wind was not the best.

Any proceesing suggestions/ comments welcome.

[rat156]

Nice.

The processing doesn't look too bad at all. At first I thought you might have made it a bit pink, but the bigger images look better and the star colours look pretty good. There may be a lot of H-Beta in the nebula, which will give it that pinkish hue as it combines with the Ha.

Excellent effort.

Cheers
Stuart

[rat156]

One thing I just noticed, it's a bit oversharp, there's some dark halos around the stars in the nebula.

Cheers
Stuart

[peter_4059]

:eyepop:Wow

Great image. Looks like some sort of insect.

[EzyStyles]

nicely done . heaps of photons and the arc around the left hand side stands out really well. your stacked shot seemsvery smooth hardly requires any processing.

[spearo]

Looks great to me
frank

[Ric]

A spectacular looking nebula, the dark lanes are very nicely defined and intricate.

[Alchemy]

hi stuart , its not actually sharpening, it is however the result of processing, i held back the stars development to bring out the neb, the brightest sections have showed up the contrast difference giving them that oversharpened look. a bit further developing could rectify this.... thanks for pointing out that it was noticable, i will fix it as i would like to print this one.

peter, spearo and ric thanks for your comments

ezy.... it was your pic in the AS&T that motivated me to have a look at this object, i had previously passed it by.

[iceman]

Wow, that's beautiful. The unprocessed version really shows that it's the quality of the raw data in the first place that makes the final image.

Yes processing is no doubt a very important aspect, and can make or break an image, but if you don't have the quality raw data to begin with, no amount of processing will turn it into a show-stopper. And this image is a show-stopper!

Lovely work!

[Alchemy]

sure is mike, its getting all the details right- scope, mount, polar alignment, colimation, guiding, good seeing, good weather, then capturing the photons. if you get all those things right then its a good chance you can then turn it into a good image. (mind you , im not going to let you see all the dogs of shots ive taken-and ive done more than a few;))

[Tamtarn]

Really unusual and interesting shaped object. Very nice with lots of detail

[Matty P]

That is one beautiful image! Nice colour and processing.

You should be very proud.

[Glenhuon]

Nice images Alchemy. Gee it does look a bit like an insect, them jagged jaws on the right look like they going after that little nebula :lol:
The name looks more appropriate to a car rego plate than a nebula :), needs a better one, Preying Mantis.

Bill