The Blue Horsehead

[gregbradley]

This is panel 1 of a mosaic for this area.

It is LRGB 90 60 60 60 with a FLI PL16803 and FSQ106EDX and reducer.
Using Baader LRGB filters.

It is near the more well known Rho Ophiuchi.

It looks like a reasonable weather forecast for this week so I am hoping to add more panels and create a mosaic for a change.

http://www.pbase.com/gregbradley/image/125328106

Greg.

[h0ughy]

lovely sea horse! Look forward to seeing this mosaic take shape Greg

[strongmanmike]

Yes, that's a spectacular field mate, look forward to the final result

Mike

[Octane]

Fantastic, Greg!

This was actually going to be my first target with the new gear.

H

[richardo]

Very well done Greg!
This is an impressive image and object for sure.

Certainly look forward to the mosaic:thumbsup:

Rich

[marc4darkskies]

Very nice Greg! Well done! :thumbsup:

Cheers, Marcus

[Hagar]

Lovely start to what looks like being a great image Greg. Great field with the dust standing out beautifully.

[batema]

What an amazing object and it is in scorpio. I would love to have a go at this and would be using a W/O Flt 110 with a Canon 400d. Any suggestions of exposure times. Beautiful image. Well done.

Mark

[TrevorW]

Yep can see the horse head in this one well done !!

[multiweb]

Pretty cool Greg. Lovely colors and awesome details. Very 3D. :thumbsup:

[gregbradley]

Its clear tonight so I'll do another panel. I just hope I can stitch them together. There's some new software that helps with mosaics isn't there?



Thanks Mike. Hopefully I'll be able to shoot most of it this week.



Its an interesting area for sure.



Thanks Rich.



Thanks Marcus. I hope I can do the mosaic processing. They are pretty tricky.



Thanks Doug.



A DSLR would depend on your light pollution. If your skies are dark then I'd go ISO800 and as long as your mount tracks well like 10 minutes. If light pollution then shorter like 4-5mins.



Yes it not as obtuse as some of these names are.



Thanks Marc. Do you know of any good mosaic software?

Greg.

[RobF]

Awesome. I wasn't familiar with this one - beautifully rendered even at this stage.

[seeker372011]

very nice-the horse really pops-unlike that stupid running chicken thingy , its obvious why this reflection neb is called the blue horse

look forward to the finished product, sure that finished mosaic will be a humdinger

[Paul Haese]

Nice looking image Greg. That whole region seems to have a lot of reflection nebulosity there. Well done.

[multiweb]

Well there are a few around. I heard a lot of good about autopano giga (http://www.autopano.net/en/photo-stitching-solutions/autopano-giga.html) . Personally I only use registar for registration and load everything in place in PS so I don't even use photomerge. All you have to do is make sure your panels are normalised the same in CCDStack or Maxim prior to save them as scaled TIFFs then you won't have any problem with gradients anywhere.

[mithrandir]

Don't know about Giga, but regular AutoPano doesn't do TIFF or FITS.

Process the individual frames with your tool of choice. They don't have to have the brightness adjusted to be identical, close will do.
Export them as a format it likes (like jpg without any compression).
Use ExifTool to add the focal length tag (only really required if different frames have different focal lengths, you can force a focal length if they are all the same).
Feed to AutoPano.
Wander off for a beverage.

Can't be too bad. The Iceman uses it too.

[gregbradley]

Thanks Rob.



Thanks. I just hope it isn't too huge a task.



Thanks Paul. Its amazing what is around the popular objects when taken with a deep image.



Thanks for the tip Marc. Only comment there is using scaled tiffs in CCDstack tends to black clip the image a bit.

Greg

[multiweb]

Indeed. It certainly does clip if you're not careful. As a rule I always lower the blackpoint 100 points and raise the white point 100 points too to give me plenty of histogram prior to save any 16Bits TIFF from CCDStack. Once you're aware of it, it's not a problem really. Once you're finished with Maxim or CCDStack there's no point carrying 16 or 32bits FITS around with an histogram as wide as a 4 lanes highway IMO. Scaled TIFFs are more than adequate to register for mosaics and star from in PS.

[gregbradley]

How do you lower the black point in CCDstack? Using adjust display and the top slider?

Greg.

[multiweb]

That's right. Background slider down and Maximum slider up. Then 'Save Scaled Data > This' - Save as type: TIFF 16 bit

[gregbradley]

Thanks Marc. I'll try that.

Greg.