Stellar Winds of Melotte 15

[Ken Crawford]

I finally finished up a two frame mosaic project of the famous area around Melotte 15. I always seem to learn something new with every project and I must say I tried lots of different approaches with this one. Everyone here has seen this object many times and many different ways. That presents challenges for projecting one’s style into an image while trying to show something familiar a bit differently. So when framing and processing this image I decided to try a “wide screen” approach.

So I think the best way to look at this image is to click on the full screen button just below the image and then use your mouse scroll wheel to zoom until you have the frame full from side to side. I am interested for you to do this as I want to know what you think as I tried using selective approaches in details and light for Depth of Field.


http://www.imagingdeepsky.com/Nebulae/Melotte15/Melotte15.htm


Of course you are free to zoom farther to look for details (or my short comings :D)

Thanks for taking the time to look,

[paulF]

As usual, simply stunning! Keep up the beautiful work Ken!

[Doomsayer]

A great aesthetic quality to this image. The wide aspect ratio and the rich blue and brown hues work so well here. Art and science in unison.

guy

[allan gould]

Brilliant as usual, Ken. A beautiful image with great areas to view.

[pmrid]

Sadly, the Heart and Soul nebs at 60+ degrees of dec are very much northern hemisphere objects so I have never seen them "in the eyepiece" but I'm happy to live vicariously through your image. It's a beaut.
Peter

[mswhin63]

Really beautiful shot, your shots are better than many cloud shots of the earth in comparison, well done.

[irwjager]

Awesome shot Ken - so much to see!

I noticed though zooming in that the image looks very soft. It could just be my shoddy version of the Flash plug-in though (I use Linux). :shrug:

[Ken Crawford]

Do me a favor, could you please click the link below the image details to download the jpg? let me know if you see a difference between the zoomify and the downloaded jpg. I am suspecting the conversion looks different with older Flash plug-in.

Thanks!

[TrevorW]

Very rich area the Melotte is one we don't get to see very often

[gregbradley]

Finally, someone has gotten some exposure time!:eyepop:

Wonderful image overall. I tend to agree it looks a bit soft in some of the dust areas which may stand a tad more sharpening? I downloaded the jpeg to look. Then again it is probably a really small neb and that may be unrealistic.

Greg.

[Octane]

That is sublime.

I love the fact that it's soft. I'm not the type to concern myself with image sharpness. Just stand back and take the whole thing in and admire a beautiful piece of work.

This is art.

H

[strongmanmike]

Arrr..too soft, too sharp bah!...meeeh perhaps? but soooo picky :zzz2:, I agree with Humi here enjoy the image for what it is and that's clearly a cracking snap shot of an amazing piece of sky, any little personally perceived imperfections are competely imaterial here ...like comenting on Elle Macphersons left nipple being slightly higher than her right ...still Elle Macpheson! :rolleyes: :love::evil2::evil: :lol:

Really Great job again...?..Kenny Koala (...soon) ;)

Oh and doing what you suggested per the viewing method works well.

Mike

[Lester]

Beautiful image Ken, thanks for the view. All the best.

[Peter Ward]

Nice one...Very cool...absolute zero cool... :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

[SkyViking]

Magnificent image Ken, congratulations on such a great capture. I too like the softness, its wonderfully understated in some sense, and yet full of rich colour and detail.
Interestingly the saturation seems stronger when I view the JPEG directly compared to when I view it in the flash zoomer. Both look great to me though. Thanks for sharing.

[TheAstroGuy]

Absolutely Sublime as alway Ken, Masterful work!

Kindest Regards

shane

[marc4darkskies]

Lovely shot Ken!

Cheers, Marcus

[RB]

Beautiful image !
Love those gorgeous hues.

:thumbsup:

[Paul Haese]

Great work as usual Ken. The colours are very rich and the overall image looks very nice.

[Hagar]

Magnificent Ken, Really lovely rendition and the detail is astounding. I am looking at your image handler (Zoomify) for images on my website at the moment. May take me a while to get my head around it but it is a cool way to handle a big image.

Thanks for posting Ken.

[TheDecepticon]

Really, I hadn't noticed!!:lol:

Another beautiful narrow band image. Love narrow band and the colours it produces!! Can't wait to afford a set of decent 2 inch ones myself. Was the sole reason for going back to a mono camera. Great stuff!!:thumbsup::thumbsup:

[Craig_L]

Astounding image KEN.

I think I wouldn't have noticed the "softness" of the neb if a few others hadn't commented - I was so entranced by your image. And maybe that is only an issue because the stars look sharp in comparison to the neb. But maybe that's what you had in mind and makes this image more magical!

[Ken Crawford]

Thanks Again for the kind comments,

The softness is a processing choice, and it relates to how much contrast is involved. There are many ways to seletively sharpen areas (which I did) but my goals here were to show the OIII curtains that flow over and around the evaporating formations. Removing this haze would make things appears sharper with more contrast but I was going for the hazey stellar winds result.

I am pleased that so many pointed this out as the comments are so important to know what people think and how they view the image.

Kindest Regards,

[irwjager]

Hi Ken,

Like SkyViking reports, I can see a fairly dramatic difference in saturation between the Zoomify and the JPEG version in some parts of the image, notably in the dust. The increased color contrast in the JPEG definitely makes details standout that aren't visible in the Zoomify version. Personally, I still would've preferred a tiny bit of selective sharpening, but looking at the JPEG I can appreciate your angle so much more.

Happy to send you some screenshots of the Flash renderer output if that helps! It's not cool a Flash app should modify your work like that...

[Ken Crawford]

Thanks! I have noticed this too and looks like a color space conversion of some sort. I just started having problems with it.

You comment about the sharpening makes me feel good as I did apply quite a bit very selectivly with masks. My goal was to apply the sharpening but make it very hard to tell that I did.

Anyway, the zoomify image is robbing me a bit. will have to do some digging..

Thanks again for the vaulable and honest feedback . .

[multiweb]

Great shot Ken. Zoomify will output tiles to JPEG. I think the standard default compression is 75% quality from the original plus any bitmap display in the flash player will loose some quality as well.

[Ken Crawford]

Corrrect, I did buy the full sourse code and was able to goto 100% jpg. I think I found the issue on this image as a color profile difference.

Thanks!

[multiweb]

I'm not familiar with the effect of the color profile but the original color depth needs to be brought down to 8bits prior to export. Level 12 quality I assume is 100% lossless compression. Levels of tiles are usually between 1 and 4 depending on the original shot pixel width and height but you have to realise you'll only get the sharpest views if your zoom level hits one of the tile's level resolution. Those are discretes levels (1,2,3,4). Not unlike 'showpixel' when you step-zoom in/out with CCDStack. Anything else will be interpolated/blurred by the flash renderer.

[Octane]

Colour profiling is extremely important.

Convert to sRGB before saving for web and keep the Adobe RGB or whatever extended colour space you're using in the original *.PSD.

H

[Fabiomax]

Amazing! My first impression is that it seems in 3D!!
Fabiomax

[lebowski]

Ciao Ken.
why a base RGB on S2-Ha_O3 ?
The star field does not show the basic RGB, do you served to give more contrast?
Bye Lebo

[jase]

Great image Ken. Not an advocate for Zoomify as yet. The resampling is less than ideal. Sometimes getting back to basics of providing different resolution images gives a level of assurance (instead of being burnt by sloppy code).

[Martin Pugh]

Highly detailed image Ken, wonderfully processed. It is such a good rendition of this object, if not a little too saturated for my liking.

I have recently processed a data set of this object belonging to a guy out in Pennsylvania. I will ask him if I can post it here for comparison purposes.

cheers
Martin