Running chicken?

[rmuhlack (Richard)]

Apparently this one is called the Running Chicken Nebula...?

36 x 5 min calibrated sub exposures, captured with a modded Canon 400D @ ISO800 and a Nikkor 200mm f4 prime lens @ f5.6

Processed with PixInsight.

Larger image here: http://www.astrobin.com/33114/

Critique welcome

[Larryp (Laurie)]

Nicely done, Richard!

[Meru (Michael)]

Love the stars, that's a good lens you got there! How on earth (and why) did you combine the Canon and Nikon? I'm also surprised how much nebulosity you've got there. Personally I think there's too much sky glow (Orange hue to the imahe)? Perhaps cut that back and then try to bring out the nebulosity more, seems to get lost in the hundreds and hundreds of stars you've got. But otherwise a very nice image

[rmuhlack (Richard)]

Thanks Meru. I use Nikon manual focus primes as they were relatively inexpensive and optically very good (vastly superior to the stock autofocus canon zooms that i had for daytime photography). They also have a hard infinity stop, which makes focusing for astrophotography a breeze. I use them with a Fotodiox Nikon-EOS adapter that I picked up on ebay which provides the correct backfocus spacing.

the red/orange hue to the image is more related to the colour balance post the camera mod and my monitor. Not a lot of light pollution here in country NSW!

With fields like this one with so many stars i'm not quite sure what I should use for the background and white references for colour balancing in PixInsight, so i just 'eyeballed it' this time. Any tips on how to do this properly in PI appreciated

[Meru (Michael)]

Ah ok makes sense. Hehe thats why I buy Nikon, any excuse to bag canon for me (But might get flogged here given canon's PR with astronomers hehe).

If its white balance then it's pretty easy, if it was LP then its more difficult I find to edit it. I just set the WB manually on my camera before shooining, somewhere around 5000K which works a treat for me. I've never used PI but Photoshop can very, very easily change hues and things so maybe give that a shot? If you shot in RAW then you can batch-correct the balance and then stack again, but some slight post-editing in PS does the treat. Not sure of any other way