Trapezium hi res.

[tornado33]

Hi all.
With the high cloud and generally awful conditions for deep sky imaging, I thought I may as well try for some hi res detail of the trapezium area of M42.
Its 3x30 sec ISO 200 shots with the 10 inch scope and modded 350d (no filter).
Raws extracted with Canon digital photo professional (comes with the camera), as 16 bit Tiffs, then put into IRIS and aligned, stacked, the result saved as a 16bit tiff and finished off in Photoshop with a touch of unsharp masking, then cropped.
Scott

[[1ponders]]

Sharp Scott ;) I'm looking to get a few of them myself. What's the FL of your scope?

[fringe_dweller]

Nice job Scott :) 1 minute 30 secs! wow
I am in the same boat as you, I cant work in 350D RAW files in CS, have to convert to 16 bit tiffs in same bundled proggy you mentioned.
Whats the consensus on this amongst digital imagers, I take it it is preferable to stack with RAW's than 16 bit TIFF's?
Damn crazy CS supports the 20D but not the 350D, being twins and all! sorta :D

[Itchy]

The way you are doing it via 16 bit tiff is fine. In fact it is probably better than using PSCS to do the RAW conversion. RAWs Must be converted to something before any thing else can take place. You are not actually using the RAW data in PS, but a converted version of the frame.

Best of all, convert the RAWS To Linear tiff then calibrate by subtracting darks and/or flats and then stack.

Cheers

[tornado33]

Hi
fl of my 10 inch scope is 1400mm.
Yes thats right, converting to 16 bit tiff preserves all the information. Iris does the conversion linear, and does a damm good job with the dark subtraction, as one draws a small rectangle in an area of no stars in the light image, Iris then uses this to "optomise" the dark so that if the dark frame length is not the same as the light frame, or taken at a different temperature, it still subtracts the noise effectively. Down side is colour balance isnt automatic, it has to be set manually and is by trial and error till I get the right colour.
Scott

[fringe_dweller]

Thanks for that Tony and Scott!
whew! That info makes me feel a lot better :) onya's :thumbsup:

[RB]

That's a great shot of the trap Scott.
Beautiful nebulosity too.

Well done.

What sort of 10" scope are you using, SCT?

[Dennis]

Very nice Scott. I can easily see A, B, C, D and then E is a huge pimple and F looks like a small bump.

Well done

Dennis

[Itchy]

Scott,

I commend you for sticking at it with Iris. I had another go at it yesterday at Ken's place (Big red telescope Ken, that is). I must admit that I have never met a more counter intuitive peice of software. We were trying to get Iris to do a Linear conversion of RAW files from Ken's Fuji S2 Pro. No matter what we tried, the best we got was a grey (all three channels identical), pre stretched file that we could only save as 8 bit tiff. His version contained no help file, which didn't. Frustration:tasdevil: :eek: :bashcomp:

Cheers

[h0ughy]

excellent shot Scott. may do them again in images plus when it arrives next week, just to see the difference. I am amazed you got anything last night, the well it wasn't cloud, just haze blotted out just about all stars, even the moon was not good when it came up, very hot too, at 11pm, last night it was still 27 degrees.

[ving]

nice shot, was looking at the trap a couple of nights ago and saw all six.
well done :D

[tornado33]

Thanks all
I found out I was doing one part in Iris wrong, I was stacking before converting back to CFA colour, turns out Im supposed to do that after subtracting the darks (I keep forgetting to take flat fields lol). Yes it has a steep learning curve but slowly getting there.
Scott