Antares Rho Ophiuchus - again

[rcheshire (Rowland)]

Reprocessed in Pixinsight. A cooled DSLR image from March 2012 SVAA club night. A completely different rendition. It was important to bring the yellow dusty veil to the foreground, which was easier with less contrast.

Very conventional approach to processing this one, but finished off with Local HistogramEqualisation and MultiscaleMedianTransform.

There's a lot in this area. It's a busy region. This is the 3rd imaging attempt on this region. Time to do something else.

For comparison with other attempts at processing and imaging this region over the last 2 years - here

[Ross G]

Very strong colours and detail Rowland.

I really like it. A very good photo.

Ross.

[rcheshire (Rowland)]

Thanks Ross. A different look. It's a challenging area and great practice.

[Paul Haese]

I like the colours but think that some darkening of the image would have greater effect. It would not require much. Overall a nice image.

[TrevorW]

Lovely colour and detail but as suggested above

Very nice

[Lester]

Wow, Rowland that is eye catching. As Paul said could be darkened just a tad. What lens/scope did you use for this? Thanks.

[rcheshire (Rowland)]

Following the advice here, I have reworked the image, recalibrating the colour. From what I can tell two additional criteria are needed - longer sub exposures and longer total time.

Lens is a Canon 200mm F/2.8 L USM @ f/4

Not sure how it will look on other monitors.

[midnight (Darrin)]

Certainly eye catching Rowland. Very well done & I like how you've treated the strong blues in the image.

Darrin...

[rcheshire (Rowland)]

Thanks Darren. If the weather improves for the SVAAclub night I am going to spend the entire time imaging this area again. The plan is to increase the dynamic range with 3 different integration times. Not sure what they will be yet

[wysiwyg (Mark)]

Originally Posted by rcheshire

Thanks Darren. If the weather improves for the SVAAclub night I am going to spend the entire time imaging this area again. The plan is to increase the dynamic range with 3 different integration times. Not sure what they will be yet

Rowland,

Since you are using PixInsight there is no need to do 3 different integration times. Take the longest image you can without saturating the brightest parts of the image, then use HDRWaveletTransform to do the work for you. There are some really good tutorials on their wbesite on how to do this effectively.
Dont worry if you saturate the stars, just take some shorter subs for star colour and blend it in with your final image using PS.

Good luck and what you are doing looks very promising.

Cheers
Mark

[naskies (Dave)]

Beautiful! I really like the latest version from last night.

[LucasB (Lucas)]

That is a very nice image! I think that it doesn't matter if you image something that has been done a lot before. It is a great test of imaging skill as there are a lot of other images to critique it against and yours is right up there!
Lucas

[rcheshire (Rowland)]

Thanks Marc, Dave and Lucas.

Unfortunately the SVAA night for imaging was not too good. I should have got there earlier, but couldn't. Cloud cover to the East and fog later in the night prevented any worthwhile images of Antares.

There will be more opportunities as it's early in the season for this region.