Eta HaRhagb

[richardo (Rich)]

Hi all.
Long time no post so
Happy New year to you all !!!
Weather here has been pretty poor what with lots of dust,
wind, salt laden dew in the nights then super hot days in the
40*c's.
Still most of you folks on the eastern sea board are swimming around the place....


Last night there was no dew but I was attacked by these typical little stink beetles
that get stuck in your hair, your ears, inbetween your key board and
great moths that fly in from no where to plague the computer
screen when in the observatory.
Lucky I just set things, turn off the screens and
walk away back to the house in comfort while i watch the downloads, only to nick out and change a filter.
I didn't worry to do any lum frames with this one but
simply combined the ha with the red channel for lum, then
did a similar combine to the red channel in the rgb composite
in Adobe.

It's always a bit of a battle with Ha combines to find the right
mixture without having the red channel stars too small. Plus
the extreme contrast can sometimes leave things a wee
bit clipped.
But that's the fun of using all the tricks to find what works.

Here's a link to my front page.. and latest image, just click on it.

http://www.baytop-observatory.com/

Hope you are all well,
and I'm certainly looking forward to DLST to finish and those
crisp clear Autumn nights.

All the best for now

Rich

[bloodhound31]

Wow Rich!

Instead of the usual foggy feel of moving through clouds of starbirth, that image gives the feeling of pea-soup. A bit like the diving I attempted in the south-coast's three metre swell in the new year.....

Good job mate! A rich pic by Rich...

Baz.

[Ric]

That's a beauty Rich, you've captured some great fine detail. The dust lanes really stand out as well.

Cheers

[jase (Jason)]

Lovely work Rich. Impressive details and nice colour balance. My only comment is the keyhole neb looks suppressed in luminosity and seems to blend into the background colours. Not sure if this is attributed to the clipping that's present (you've black clipped all channels - RGB). Perhaps there's some hidden data which could be stretched to define this better. Overall, well done.

Watch out for those stink beetles. Reminds me of the time I was taking dusk skyflats and my mount hit the western limit and started emitting this high pitched alarm. When I entered the observatory sometime after, there was approximately eight giant moths covering the Gemini controller where the noise was coming from. Must have thought the noise was a distress signal or similar <I'm no Harry Butler, nature dude>.

[richardo (Rich)]

Originally Posted by bloodhound31

Wow Rich!

Instead of the usual foggy feel of moving through clouds of starbirth, that image gives the feeling of pea-soup. A bit like the diving I attempted in the south-coast's three metre swell in the new year.....

Good job mate! A rich pic by Rich...

Baz.

Thanks Baz for taking a peek.
Not ideal conditions so I sort of missed having the lum compilation to make the blend easier....
Sounds like the surfs up over your way... even in the rivers

Originally Posted by Ric

That's a beauty Rich, you've captured some great fine detail. The dust lanes really stand out as well.

Cheers

Thanks Ric,
had to mess around a bit with it, enhance here and there.
At least this years effort hasn't the anonymous fifth spike...
Here's to better weather for all of us hey

Originally Posted by jase

Lovely work Rich. Impressive details and nice colour balance. My only comment is the keyhole neb looks suppressed in luminosity and seems to blend into the background colours. Not sure if this is attributed to the clipping that's present (you've black clipped all channels - RGB). Perhaps there's some hidden data which could be stretched to define this better. Overall, well done.

Watch out for those stink beetles. Reminds me of the time I was taking dusk skyflats and my mount hit the western limit and started emitting this high pitched alarm. When I entered the observatory sometime after, there was approximately eight giant moths covering the Gemini controller where the noise was coming from. Must have thought the noise was a distress signal or similar <I'm no Harry Butler, nature dude>.

Hi Jase,
I guess I could have gone for some lum but I went for the short cut as conditions weren't idea plus I was starting to get a little pissed off with beetles out side and then the little slimy ones managed to get in side and attack me at the computer there.
Never really liked just using ha without luminance to blend with...

I agree with you with the flatness from the dark regions to the central neb. The Ha data I really cranked it to give extreme contrast. It blew away a fair bit of detail to the area around Eta. I tried using the red channel to bring some detail back, but didn't want to loose the highlights that only ha can bring out along the reef areas.
I might go back and reprocess my Ha subs to give more a wider dynamic range through the grey scale and see if I can eek out better defined detail.
I had to work on specific areas to make things not look flat.
I could just get some lum when the weather plays ball and that would solve a lot of problems.
Never really an easy area around Eta, bit like M16 I find with these heavy dark lanes that cut off into large emission areas, hard to keep good contrast while retaining fine detail.

Observatories are really little havens for all sorts of creatures. I have a resident gecko who's second generation... don't ask me what happened to it's mother. I sort of timidly open my observatory up after I haven't been out for a while expecting to see some half crazed king brown lash out at me.. lucky it's sealed well enough.. still you never know!

Thanks guys for your nice comments and critique..
Always appreciated.

All the best
Rich

[Garyh]

Nice one Rich!..good to see another fine post from you!
I think you have done a nice job with the blending of Ha into the image.
Loads of details
Don`t those beatles drive you nuts!
Took the cover plate of the back of the OTA the other day and had a few dead beatles drop out..lol glad they have now become fertilizer!
cheers