M7 in Scorpius

[Rigel003]

Taken the same night as my M83 image posted earlier. I found this one surprisingly difficult to process with wall to wall stars and no real area of background sky to speak of. The more you bring out the Milky Way background the less obvious the cluster becomes. A bit of a balancing act.

Bigger image here (http://www.pbase.com/rigel003/image/142859377/original)

Takahashi TSA-120 with flattener f/7.3
Astro-Physics 900GTO mount
FLI Microline 8300 CCD camera

LRGB: 80,40,40,40 mins

[TheDecepticon]

Hi mate!

Very nice. Good effort with the starfield. :thumbsup:

You could try to seperate the star field from the cluster using the colour range tool in PS and put the stars onto another layer, then you could maybe bring out some more of the dark lanes and golden colour in the starfield.

If you haven't tried that already, that is.:rolleyes:

[TrevorW]

Very nicely done

[jjjnettie]

awww you chopped the little mans head and arms off. He's in the top left hand side, down on one knee with his hand up praising the astronomy gods for the clear skies. LOLOL
You don't a great job on the processing. It's one of my favourite clusters, so long as the little dude is in one piece of course. :D

[rogerg]

Very nice. I really like that shot, great star field.

[Rigel003]

Thanks for the comment JJJ. Apparently the little dude is Barnard 287 ...sorry about the amputation.

[Rigel003]

Good suggestions, Gray. I'll see what I can do but the original capture didn't suggest that there was an an enormous colour difference between the cluster stars and background. The milky way stars seemed to have quite a bit of blue too as well as the golden hues.

[midnight]

Very nice Graeme. I think you have done well to make the cluster stand out.

Darrin...

[multiweb]

Very nice close up. Beautiful field. :thumbsup: