Lulin 26 February 2009

[Paul Haese]

Captured Lulin last night with 3 subs at 3 minutes. I guided on the stars.

Lulin here (http://paulhaese.net/Lulin26feb2009.html)

Comets and criticism welcome.

[lesbehrens]

looks really good:eyepop::thumbsup:

[Dennis]

Hi Paul

That’s a beautiful shot – well done! How did you manage to avoid Lulin smearing, as the movement in 3 minutes would be quite significant at that image scale?

Love those round stars – they’re probably the most perfectly round stars I have ever seen, yet still retain a natural look.

Cheers

Dennis

[anthony.tony]

Beautiful Shot.

[gregbradley]

Super shot.

Greg.

[Tilt]

Well done Paul, some great shots around of Lulin and this is one of them.

Michael

[Screwdriverone]

Great pic Paul, best one I have seen so far in my opinion, I also like the line "Comets and criticism welcome"

May have been a slip, but it made me laugh! :lol:

Thanks

Chris

[desler]

Great shot, probably the best i've seen! Great skills on show!


Darren

[Paul Haese]

Thanks all for the comments er I mean comets? Freudian slip I think.

Dennis, what I did was track on the stars to get the stars round, then I stacked the three images in IP. Once stacked I noticed there was some elongation in the head of the comet. I then went to CS and did the final processing work after doing DD in IP to bring out the detail. In CS I made a point of using Auto levels which had the effect of burning out the core which hid the head elongation. So in this case it is good to have the core or head burnt out. It hides the error. I did some other stuff like colour balance and saturation, and some curves work too. All up I am really happy with this image of Lulin. I should have imaged it when there were two tails but was slack about attempting this.

[Kevnool]

Stunning image this one has the wow factor for sure...Cheers Kev.

[Liz]

Wow, that is one beautiful shot, excellent job Paul :thumbsup:

[bloodhound31]

Brilliant Paul, handy guide star there to the lower left too....

Baz.

[RB]

Paul I'd like to make a suggestion.
There is more detail in your image that you should be able to tease out.

I've had a play with you image and I can post it here if you want or I can just suggest that by adjusting some of the levels you should be able to bring out your red channel (which is clipped atm).
This will reveal the lovely dust tail of the comet.

Good work.

[Garyh]

Nice and natural image of Lulin!
I like it!

[Paul Haese]

RB, post it if you like. Perhaps a little tut to let everyone know how you went about doing it.

[RB]

Thanks Paul.

I've attached a re-pro from your original and also have included your original and the re-pro both with the histograms attached.

I basically adjusted the red channel using levels and curves to move the Red histogram over so it's not clipped (and yielding a single peak in the combined histogram), thus reveal a bit more detail in the tail.
Basically just moving the black & mid points in Levels and applying an "S" curve in Curves.
Working from a copy of a jpg means there will be more artifacts but it's just to illustrate that perhaps you can recover more detail from the original files.

Anyway well done in capturing this lovely comet.

[Paul Haese]

thanks for doing that Andrew. A couple of things though. I note that the sky background is now a little red and the heat banding from the chip is now more evident. It was hot that night and I got some terrible banding on the images, I guess this is more of a balancing act to prevent the banding showing. Still there is more of the tail evident in the image.

Once again thanks.

[RB]

Yes it is a fine balancing act.
Also I find there's a huge difference from monitor to monitor, even with my own sometimes.
On my main calibrated 24" it looks fine, yet on the laptops it shows up with more noise.

Hard to find a happy medium sometimes.

:thumbsup: