Slowly working my exposures up

[Peter.M]

Hi guys, I decided that I need to get my sub exposure time up and thought that I would do it in steps. Last night I managed 5 minute subs, and authough the noise is quite high ( only 6 subs stacked ) I can already see the difference between my previous images.

[adman (Adam)]

Thats really nice. I love the brown colour of the dust.

Adam

[madwayne (Wayne)]

Hi Peter

Thanks for sharing this. I like it alot, some shorter exposures for the trapezium and you are on a dead set winner. The Running Man is just a fantastic capture on it's own - well done.

Would love to see you image M45, my all time favourite object. Looking at what you have presented here I think your gear would take a cracking image of this area.

Good luck with it.

Wayne

[bmitchell82 (Brendan)]

The image is starting to come to life now! 5 min and up is where DSLR's start getting some decent data accumulating. are you able to put a unscaled image up even if its of low quality just to assess how well you have gone on the guiding side of things.?

Like i said in another post before, if you can get your stars pretty much round then you will start getting some amazing details coming though.

For the trapezium, you can do a few tricks if you use Photoshop.

using layers copy a unprocessed version of your 5 minute sub possibly twice so you have 3 layers, you can then start processing using layer masks and allowing the un processed to start filtering though. Its a nifty trick if you cant be arsed taking multiple shots as long as in the shortest sub you can still resolve the details you can use some selective processing to bring the rest out! I really should do a tutorial on that sometime soon

Brendan.

[Peter.M]

Thanks guys, Im at work at the moment so I cant post my full scale image but I will when I get home. I hadnt thought about using less stretched data to mask the core but it sounds like a good idea.

I think M45 is quite low in the sky for me ( from memory ), last night orion just cleared a tree I have to my north. I would curse it however it does obscure the streetlight somewhat. Ontop of that I have the skyglow of Adelaide to contend with in the north. I also find M45 to be one of the most beautiful objects in the sky though so maby I will try anyway.

Thanks again
Pete

[Alchemy (Clive)]

Wow.... Wonderful work, hard to believe it's only 30 mins exposure.

[Peter.M]

Here is the full size image, unfortunately the core is overexposed in my subexposures so no amount of processing will help me. I have shown my friends the other images that I have taken of orion (with masking) but I feel it fails to capture how bright the object is. I kind of like the overexposed core in that manner.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=VFJ1AJTA

16mb

Unfortunately I dont know where to upload this too that dont resize it so ****ty megaupload will have to do for the minute.

[Poita (Peter)]

The other thing worth trying, is find a reference image of the object that you really like from another photographer, hubble, anywhere and download and resize it to the same size as your image.
Try using photoshop's 'match colour' tool with your image and the reference image, it can sometime bring out details and colour balance that really makes a difference. Doesn't always work well but sometimes gets great results, especially on planets.

[Moon (James)]

Pete,
This looks really good. The field of view is perfect and you framed it well. The huge diffraction spikes look great too.
Since we're all handing out tips - I also have an easy one that might help
In Photoshop...
Filter->Noise->Reduce Noise and have a play with the 'reduce color noise' slider.
If you click on 'advanced' you can also apply it a bit heavier to the green channel if you like.
James