Another Leo trio

[Rigel003]

Must be Leo season. Taken last Saturday from Paul Haese's pristine skies near the shores of Lake Alexandrina. Pretty good seeing but very gusty at ground level. I didn't end up with as much data as I would have liked due to a very late start after some computer and electrical glitches. I'm now in the running for the world's slowest drift aligning record. The blue channel was very noisy and there is a slight gradient across the frame. I've done some fairly substantial noise reduction on the background. I'll rework it when I have a bit more time but it's a good start.

Small cropped image below and larger full-frame here (http://www.pbase.com/rigel003/image/142203702/original)


Takahashi TSA-120 with flattener@ f/7.3
Astro-Physics 900GTO mount
FLI Microline 8300
LRGB: 90,40,40,40 with 10 min subs

[DJ N]

Lovely capture Graeme. Very nicely done

Cheers,

Daniel

[allan gould]

Great framing and colour in your image. Really well done and I like it.

[Paul Haese]

Ooohhh yeah, nicely done Graeme. That gradient is hardly noticable, and most like was influenced by the light pollution to the north. Nice work indeed. Love the detail.

[multiweb]

Wow. Excellent shot. :thumbsup:

[Nico13]

Now there's one to be proud of and something to aspire to. :thumbsup:

[marc4darkskies]

Definitely pay that one Graeme! Very nicely done! :thumbsup:

Cheers, Marcus

[gregbradley]

A FLI ML8300 - good one. You show you have great taste!

Beautifully sharp and nice tight stars but the colours of the galaxies are a tad off. Galaxies typically are bluish arms and yellowish cores often with brownish dust lanes.

There is some colour noise in the background as well that is not distracting but could be cleaned up a bit.

So my suggestion is to work over the colour balance tool and see if you can bring out those blue arms, yellowish cores and brown dust lanes more.

And you are in common company regarding slow drift aligning. I did an extremely slow drift aligning a month ago.

I ended up using T-point which took hardly anytime and got it close to perfect in less than half an hour. My drift align was way off.

Greg.

[atalas]

A great effort on a favorite trio Graeme!

[Rigel003]

Thanks for the comments everyone and for the suggestions, Greg. I'll have another go at it shortly.

[TheDecepticon]

Very nice, very smooth. Well done, even if it is not quite the right colour.

[Ross G]

Great photo Graeme.

Nice deatil and colours.

Ross.