[PRejto (Peter)]

This will be my first post of an image with all my new gear that isn't so new any more! It's taken me forever to get going with the PMX mount and a thousand camera driver issues (now resolved), not to mention the vagaries of processing, bad weather, etc. Anyway, enough preamble. Comments greatly appreciated as I'm really just in the beginning stages of learning how to do this. Compared to other Helix postings here I suspect I may have pushed the colour saturation a bit too far, but I kind of like the drama....

This is about 4 hours of capture total (6 min sub frames) in RGB using the Hutech IDAS LP filter from my back yard in Sydney. I collected luminance data, but using red as luminance looks better to me. I used CCDStack for the RGB, and CS5 for adding R(Lum), then LAB color to intensify, unsharp mask, and Noise Ninja to smooth. I am only partially successful in getting rid of blue bloat using the minimum filter on the blue channel. There are some dark star boarders on some stars embedded in the nebula which I would like to eliminate. I'm not sure how to do that. Any and all suggestions will be appreciated! Thanks for looking!

Peter

Edit: I just looked at this image on a friend's computer. I am pretty surprised that it looks very over saturated and dim. I think I cannot edit any longer on my laptop screen....it's way too bright.