M16

[Jeffkop]

Time for some more questions to the learned out there.

Here is my third image with my new equipment. It looks to me like it is over exposed in the bright star areas but one look at some great shots of this object show that there is much more nebulosity to reveal, I assume with a longer exposure. So my question is ... Is this achieved by taking short exposures and stacking the results. If so what is the procedure ... I imagine I stack the individual LRGB images then make the composite from the stacked ones ... OR by some chance do I stack the composite ones ??

I take my mount inside after every use and so I have to do a drift align every time I set it up. Tonight I didnt as I had to wait for the cloud to clear and that was 10.30. I have a 4 hour window of opportunity in this area of the sky because of house and trees so with the delay, I just started imaging and I think I suffered a little as there were larger errors than I have seen in the y axis in the autoguide and so I think the stars are ever so slightly elongated from top to bottom.

I have tried not to fiddle with this image too much, just the darks and the flat and some minor adjustment of histogram and despeckle.



Thanks for any help

Jeff

[Garyh]

Hi Jeff,
Not much help with calibrating LRGB images, but yes you stack all your channels separately then make up your color image from there.
Colors look pretty good as well as guiding but one thing I have noticed is that the histogram is black clipped so you probably have captured more fainter details but that it has been lost somewhere along the line....
I`m sure if you redo it more carefully you should be able to bring out much more! :thumbsup:
By the way what are the details for the exposures?
cheers Gary