Building an astro photo.

[bloodhound31]

This thread is to show the progression of an astro-photo over a few nights (many hours) of image data capture and subsequent stacking.

Tonight's stack (captured last night) is five images of twenty minutes exposure each, with NO flats or darks subtracted yet.

Over the next couple of months, I will hopefully get some more clear nights with no moon, where I can capture more images of this region, and progressively add the data.

Once the signal-to-noise ratio starts to smooth out, I will also bring in the flats and darks, arriving at a final image of many hours of exposure.

M78 is a bright diffuse reflection nebula in the Orion region, roughly 1,600 light years away. Inside it, are two stars around magnitude 10 which both light up the cloud from within.

This image data was captured with a Skywatcher Black Diamond ED 120 APO Refracting telescope and an Orion Starshoot Pro CCD camera mounted on an EQ6 Pro mount. Images are captured in Light RAW 1x1 then converted to colour. RGB Color correction is taken from a white point.

Stay tuned...

Baz.

[AlexN]

Just as a thought Baz.. I know its painful after 5x20min exposures.. but you really might want to consider centering the blue reflection nebula a little more, as most of the interesting folds of dust and nebulosity are to out of the left hand side of your field of view there....

Considering the exposure duration thus far, I would have expected to see a fair bit more dust too...


Sounds like a great project, especially on this target that is so often overlooked by photographers, largely in favor of the horse head, M42 and Eta Carine this time of year... There are a few really stunning targets around Orion that just don't get imaged....

I look forward to seeing the image progress..

[bloodhound31]

Thanks Alex, yes, I had that in mind mate. I cropped off some rubbish in this case as the scope shifted for two of the exposures. (Balance issue fixed now) I will be centering it for the next lot.

Cheers,

Baz.

[bloodhound31]

Here you go, so far I got 16 x 20 minute exposures stacked, 10 x 20 minute darks subtracted, 10 x 0.1 sec flats with 10x 0.1 sec flat-darks subtracted.

I think I will get a few more subs though and keep going with it. I had to reject over 2 hours worth of exposures due to all kinds of anomalies, but 16 is pretty satisfying so far.

Baz.

[AlexN]

Good going Baz... 16x20min subs is a good amount of data, there is no doubt about that...

I had a fiddle in photoshop, and I think there is a lot more in the image that can be stretched out... You posted a 42kb jpg, so compression artefacts were hard to work around, but I had a play with only levels and curves to see what I could get out of it, and I think it shows the extent of what you've captured, however using the raw files I dare say you could get much more out..

Hope you dont mind my fiddling.. Im a bit starved for data at the moment, and will process up just about anything! hahah

Ps - I only cropped out your ASIGN Observatory label as it was messing with the histogram and it made it hard to figure out what was what..

[telemarker (Keith)]

Huge amount of data, this will look awesome when you're done. Alex shows the extent of the data. Look forward to seeing the end result.

Regards