Had a great time at Barambah on Sunday night. I decided to concentrate on 2 targets only - NGC 300 and Pleiades.
Got the wierdest results for NGC 300, star trails in one corner but fine at the opposite corner, as if there had been a field rotation yet the scope was guiding perfectly. Found that the camera was slipping in the and of the scope - doh.
I have attached my effort for the Pleiades, fairly happy but there is a bit of noise, I may have gone a bit long in the exposures for the stars.
10 x 8 min subs plus darks, bias and flats using a SW ED80 on a HEQ5 Pro, Canon 1000D, PHD guided, DeepSkyStacker and PhotShop CS3.
Is there any way to reprocess the nebulosity without the starlight?
There's lots of promise in your data.
If one of the guru's out there can explain how to mask stars, you'll be able to concentrate on drawing out your nebulosity without the worry of burning out the stars. Looking forward to learning how to do it myself.
i always prefer M45 with diffraction spikes, i think it looks nicer with so many bright stars around, and maybe it might help with bringing out the reflection nebula more.
Great wisps of nebulosity on display Adam. Very nice work. Be careful with only selecting the nebulosity and not the stars when selectively processing data. It important to try keep the image aesthetic. Bright nebulosity without vibrant stars can look out of place.
You can use the basic colour range tool in PS, feather and inverse the selection. This may however only pick up the brighter stars. If you want to select even the fainter stars you can do the following;
Star Selection (from Russ Croman):
1. Make a grayscale copy of the image. I'll call this image #2.
2. High-pass filter image #2 with a radius of one pixel.
3. Apply a Gaussian blur to image #2 with a radius of one pixel.
4. Invoke Image->Adjust->Threshold.
5. Adjust the Threshold Level one click at a time until just the stars are white and everything else is black.
6. In the original image, in the Channels Palette, create a new channel. Name it "Stars." Choose "color indicates masked areas."
7. Paste image #2 into this channel.
8. Make just the RGB channels visible (i.e. make the Stars channel invisible).
9. Discard image #2.
10. In the original image, invoke Select->Load Selection. Choose the Stars channel you just created.
11. Invoke Select->Expand and expand the selection by a few pixels (e.g., three).
12. Voila!
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haha
