widefield crux + carina from Snake Valley

[janoskiss (Steve H)]

My body clock is all out of whack after all those late nights star partying and I cannot sleep. So I've been spending this early morning processing some shots from Snake Valley.

Here is a widefield shot of Crux + Carina +.... taken at about 1am, Nov 21.

Fujifilm F30 compact digital camera, zoom at widest setting: 8mm (35mm equivalent for traditional 35mm film), aperture at f/2.8. 7 x 15 sec exposures at ISO 400.

I have never done anything like this so I'm really just guessing and feeling my way in the dark here. Any tips would be appreciated, esp. if anyone knows a way to get rid of the achromatic lens blue halos around stars. Here are my processing steps:

- 6MP jpegs resized to 2MP using ImageMagick
- 2MP images aligned using ImageJ (and stackreg plugin)
- frames combined using ImageMagick
- final level tweaks in the Gimp (and resize for web)
- touch-up to remove one localised artefact form camera

The result is not too bad from a little pocket camera I suppose. You can easily see the Coal sack, Eta carinae neb and quite a few of the brighter clusters. And skyglow from Ballarat bottom left.

[iceman (Mike)]

Nice one Steve, that's how my widefields started too

[atalas]

It's a nice shot Steve.... the Jpeg compression is hurting It,do you have a link?

[janoskiss (Steve H)]

thanks Mike and Louie, that's noise in the original images, not jpeg compression.

[Octane (Humayun)]

Steve,

Nicely done.

Reminds me of my first few images.

Regards,
Humayun

[h0ughy (David)]

great stuff, one day I will get a ripper like that, looks like you has dark skies too!

[danielsun]

Go Jano!!! Nice shot.