Orion collected by Hough and processed by Sidonio

[strongmanmike]

Dave came over today and gave me the raw files of his wide field Orion DSLR shot, to work with :)

Not having worked with DSLR files it was a little different but a little fiddling got me there I think?

I'm not 100% happy with the look of the stars particularly the three brightest stars but they suffered from a little chromatic aberation and the field is not flat either but I think I have managed to extract most of the vast spread of smokey faint dust and gas that is all over the field and preserve the floating in space look..?

With three or four times the exposure this could be a pretty impressive field

NB* The detail in the main nebula core was provided by a previous long FL shot taken by me with an ED80 and SXVH9 - coregistered in Astroart and layered/blended in.

http://www.pbase.com/strongmanmike2002/image/118468247/original

Mike

[DavidU]

Ah ! A Hougonio:D
Great team effort there. The jjj foal came out well.

[dpastern]

Ughh I'm so dense sometimes...I was wondering who this Sidonio character was lol. Ugh! I'm blaming it on this nasty head cold that I have and that's that :P

That's a nice widefield shot, what lens? Plenty of detail there, yes, more data could be nice I agree.

Dave

edit: now I know why you have your nickname (just looking at your pbase site) - crikey!!!!

[AlexN]

Great data, and great processing..

I agree with regards to the 3 brighter stars looking a little rough.. but all in all the look is impressive... doubling the sub duration and the overall exposure time would definitely have brought out the dim nebulosity that encompasses that entire field, however, even as it is, it just looks.. Pretty..

Its just an awesome area of sky...

Oooh.. I feel a mosaic coming on... add another panel to get M78 as well and you'll be set!! :D haha

[Jeffkop]

Pretty damn impressive you guys.

I dont know how much difference it make looking at a bigger less compressed image makes, but this one is in a different league than the originals .. and that takes nothing away from those by the way. Having seen this process now I notice what I think is a trademark Sidonio .. lots of blue stars. Its a great look that so appeals to me in this type of photography.

Havent wasted your day fellas, thanks for this.

[multiweb]

Looks very neat. Loads of nebulosity captured in the data. Lovely colors too. :thumbsup:

[gregbradley]

Great team effort and it was great to finally meet you guys.

Greg.

[Paul Haese]

Great team effort. Like the processing and the capture is good too. I like the positioning of the nebulae.

[iceman]

That's a beauty. Well done David on the capture, and the reprocessing is just great, Mike.

Top stuff.


Nah you should see him now.. he's all soft ;)

I won't see him until SPSP next year - he'll have forgotten I said that by then ;)

[gbeal]

A cracker to be sure, great work guys. You have me salivating over the new 200/4 I got today, can't wait to try this.
Gary

[dpastern]

hahaha! For your sake I hope Mike! In all seriousness though, wow, 150kg in each hand. I can't get over that. Wow.

Dave

[renormalised]

Or a "Houdonio":P:D

Great work, guys:D:D

[h0ughy]

he has the memory of an elephant Mike:rofl:

nice to see you had a go at it Mike, maybe the dust could have been brought out more;)

[strongmanmike]

Well I have the trunk :D

I tried to keep a natural floating appearence for the dust, I found trying to go harder on the dust imparted a processed look, always had to strike the right balance :thumbsup:

The hardest thing was dealing with those dam huge diffraction spikes, makes layer blending rather hard for me as an APO man for s long :eyepop:

Mike

[strongmanmike]

Actually Dave, my World Record was 160kg in each hand for a distance of 51m and I carried 185kg in each hand for 100m with just three setdowns in training :D

Might be able to do 165g in each hand now..? :sadeyes: :rofl:

[dpastern]

hooly cadooly! I'd be lucky to lift 50kg and would probably have a hernia and back failure lol. You certainly ate your weeties and did a lot of training to get that strong. I always wondered where your nick came from, now I know ;-)

Seriously though, good effort guys - is it me or am I starting to see more sharing of data between amateurs now? I think that's a great idea to be honest.

Dave

[Bolts_Tweed]

Gday

I know what you mean Mike. I did a Sidonio on the image as well (and I mean that as good thing :) - no way am i going to pile it on a man that can lift more in one go than I do in a month) but I left it on the computer. Hope you dont mind Hough but Marples up here speaks highly of you (I dont know if that is a good thing or not knowing Marples) and as I wasn't going to publish it we thought it wouldnt matter - just researching for the mosaic I am working on

Obviously I wasnt going to get much by converting 8 bit to 16 then playing with it - but a log stretch and some other stuff i've been doing to bring out faint dust bought out all that faint nebulosity as being real. In fact there is so much around all the edges I thought it was vignetting when I first saw it. Comparing it Andreos image (http://blog.deepskycolors.com/archive/2009/09/19/orions-belt-and-sword.html) shows it all to be faint nebulosity in exactly the right place (top and btm left of the image I am talking about).

My point is that i am agreeing with Mike. You can pull out more nebulosity (or faint dust) in processing but it starts to look almost unnatural but it is definately there - this is definately an area I am concentrating on this season deeeeeep.

Nice image guys.

Mark Bolton

[kinetic]

OM..G ....

That is just beautiful.
Nice collaboration guys!:thumbsup:

Steve

[h0ughy]

how did you rescale and blend your data?

as for the trunk:help:

[strongmanmike]

I opened your image along with a narrow field Orion 80ED shot of the main Orion Nebula, in Astroart4, I marked the same three stars in each image and clicked coregister - bingo, the result was a largely black frame with my image shrunk down and rotated into the spot your Orion neb sat in your wide field. In PS I then carefully lassoed the core, feathered and copy and pasted it onto your image and blended it it in - easy :D

Mike

[h0ughy]

ok a few lessons there - but in the absence of short exposures and data like you have Mr Sidonio I am snookered

[jase]

Good Gawd, you've totally lost me Mike :lol:;)

Great to see a successful collaborative effort. Top work.