Hi
It was one of those nights again last night, trying to decide whether to try some imaging or not. There was patchy cloud dotted over the sky with a few clear patches and occasionally some thicker patches drifting in occasionally, I have seen this before where I live and sometimes it is worth giving it a go even if only to salvage a few frames.
I decided to give Van den Berg 142 (Elephants trunk nebula) in Cepheus a go as it had just risen high enough over my neighbours tree. I managed to get 15x10 minute unguided subframes with the TMB 115/Starlight Xpress H36 on my Paramount ME. Unfortunately 6 of the frames had to be junked because of cloud damage and the last two frames because "good light stopped play".
I did a sum combine and 0.8 gamma stretch in Maxim DL and then transferred to CS2 where I used 3 iterations of curves and local contrast enhancement using Noel's tools.
I have enclosed the widefield version and also a cropped closeup. I was having a further play with Noel's tools and added false colour, these can be seen on my website
http://www.imagingtheheavens.co.uk
in the image gallery under nebulae
Considering the clouds and short imaging time I am quite pleased with the result
Thanks for looking
Regards
Gordon
http://www.imagingtheheavens.co.uk/U...nt-trunkHa.jpg
http://www.imagingtheheavens.co.uk/U...runkHacrop.jpg