[PhotonCollector (Paul)]

Yes the green is rather interesting isn't it :-) Certainly a bonus from the camera - which I thought it might do because of the cameras ability to record many more levels of brightness - 16,384 levels v's 4096 levels in prior Canon sensors - that's 4x more. Also I had the new camera modified with a clear wide-band sensor replacement.

These new versions of the image are processed in another software package that I just downloaded - IRIS v5.5 - which supports the Canon 450D 14-bit raw images - and as I suspected the green is still prevalent in the image. The 1st image is a sedate/natural version of the image - pretty much a brightened look at the raw image. The 2nd image is the same image with the usual barrage of image processing.

The image in the original post was processed with ImagesPlus which slightly corrupts the 450d RAW images and so I had to crop off the corruptions - along top and especially bottom edge - which resulted in loosing the cluster you see in this new image processed with IRIS which properly supports the Canon 450d raws.

I really didn't expect the image to be judged by histogram analysis - this was only the second image I've had to process with the new camera (which could not be processed normally) and then I masked the centre of the image in Photoshop (which can really mess up colours) so I wasn't too worried about histograms in my excitement of producing a "first-light" image - the image looked about right to show people on IIS.

Admittedly the image is likely not to processed technically correct and it might look a little too green and un-balanced - okay so I was DUI on the joystick! - the histogram maybe cut - ImagesPlus does that for you if you let it and so do some other filters and gradient things etc.

RB: do the images need to be technically correct before I post them ?

As tornado33 suggested - it will be very interesting to see how well the camera records green colours in the Helix Nebula.

So far it is proving to be extremely low noise and providing some very smooth 15-Megabyte images. There is also no AMP GLOW any more cause the 450d turns the amplifier off during long exposures. Incidentially Gary Honis (find him on the web) is using ISO-1600 with a Canon450D and getting some amazing galaxy images with just 2-minute sub-frames).

regards to all and thanks for looking.