Late season Eta Carinae

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

Folks,

I've been experimenting with my new scope and wanted to post in here for feedback from you grown-ups

Just 17x 3 minute subs and lacking any darks on a cool night in SE QLD, with Eta Carinae a bit low and otherwise non-ideally placed in the sky, this started off as just a test as it's a bright object full of nuances, but it turned out that my images are quite bright and busy with nuances too! So far I haven't applied a star mask as I've always found that a challenge with this subject.

The first is the full FOV, the second is a 100% crop around the Keyhole. Looks like my camera has been holding out on me waiting to play with a decent scope

Anyhow, feedback / recommendations / suggestions for processing appreciated

Cheers,
Dunk

Edit: added version with gentler saturation

[rustigsmed (Russell)]

hi dunk,

would be helpful if you gave the heads up of how you processed it? photoshop? pixinsight?

looks a little heavy on possibly noise reduction or highlights tool from photoshop.
nice colours and framing a pretty fine test if you ask me!

Russ

[Rex]

Hi Dunk,
Not bad going for a test mate. Some nice details in there, the full field looks a little over saturated perhaps, but all in all a very nice image.

[RobC (Rob)]

Hi Dunk - Not bad mate . What is the focal length of that scope. The cropped view looks amazingly detailed and clean for up that close. Looks a little bit over saturated on my monitor. Suggest you check the calibration of your monitor.

Rob

[Spookyer (Brett)]

Looks good, nice wide field view. What scope and camera are you using?

[multiweb (Marc)]

Great colors but there is a lot of motling introduced by your processing, likely noise control or sharpening.

[RickS (Rick)]

Looks pretty good, Dunk. I was wondering the same as Marc but it's hard to tell what's going on with the tiny IIS image attachments.

Cheers,
Rick.

[Geoff45 (Geoff)]

Nice eta Carinae, but I have to be a heretic and say that I'm always a bit disappointed with eta shots. I really think that it is one of the few objects in the sky that is best appreciated visually. I've looked at lots of pics (including my own) and none of them seem to match the real life view through a 10"+ scope with something like an ethos eyepiece.

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

Thanks everyone for all the feedback.

This was taken last Saturday just north of Brisbane and being just after sunset the seeing was a bit hit and miss, although it was a nice cool evening for the camera.

• Scope: Skywatcher Esprit 100 f/5.5
• Camera: modded Canon 1100D (with Baader BCF filter fitted)
• Mount: EQ6

I'm currently evaluating PixInsight and so far I'm intrigued by some of the functions, it seems a pretty powerful package. Both stacking and stretching seem to be kinder to stars than my previous workflow, so I'm keen to learn how to apply a star mask...just haven't got around to it yet

I can see what you guys mean by the mottling, but I believe this to be an issue of resampling and or compression for IIS I've attached a crop of the Keyhole (100%) after just the histogram stretch and before attacking it ACDNR or HDRMT (and baking the saturation to 250 degrees )

I had my camera modded about 6 months ago and since then the weather has been pretty awful most of the time, so it's only recently that I've been able to get some proper (more than 1 sub!) test data with it, and of course the new scope. The red push in the images after modding I found quite tricky to deal with satisfactorily using conventional means, hence the interest in an alternative approach.

Any tips and tricks from more experienced processing guys like yourselves is very much appreciated, especially to maximise my evaluation period, as it's a tough sell to the other half for a piece of astro software of this value, as opposed to something tangible like new glass

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

Originally Posted by ghsmith45

Nice eta Carinae, but I have to be a heretic and say that I'm always a bit disappointed with eta shots. I really think that it is one of the few objects in the sky that is best appreciated visually. I've looked at lots of pics (including my own) and none of them seem to match the real life view through a 10"+ scope with something like an ethos eyepiece.

I hear you Geoff! My favourite view so far has been with my 4" Skylight with my Pentax 40mm which (when boot space permits) what I use while my mount is imaging!

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

FWIW, I used HDRMT 5 layers, 1 iteration with lightness mask, ACDNR with lightness mask also, StdDev 1.2 for Lightness 3.2 for Chrominance (other settings at defaults). Then another gentle histogram stretch and a good stretch of saturation.