Lagoon Nebula (M8)

DJScotty (Scott) · #1 18-06-2014, 03:40 PM

About 21 hours of data taken over 4 nights of glorious weather in Brisbane...
100 bias, flats and dark flats.
50 Darks
Taken on a Canon 600D with clip in CLS Filter
8" f5 Newtonian on a HEQ5 Pro
Guided with PHD using Logitech c920 webcam
Deep Sky Stacker for stacking and PSCS6 for processing.

Fairly happy... Actually, no, very happy with this image

My Orion G3 mono camera still has not arrived...

LightningNZ (Cam) · #2 18-06-2014, 04:11 PM

Very smooth! It's obvious you've collected a lot of data for this.

I imagine you can pull a little more out of this, the background seems very flat black. You could also select the stars and try punching up the colour vibrancy in them.

How long were your subs?
-Cam

DJScotty (Scott) · #3 18-06-2014, 05:40 PM

Thanks for the feedback.

They were 10 minutes at 1600ISO.

I like your suggestions. Is that able to be done in Photoshop CS6? If so do you have a workflow I could use.

In the meantime, I will try some ideas I have using my Astronomy Tools plug ins...

DJScotty (Scott) · #4 21-06-2014, 07:54 PM

Thanks Cam for your feedback. Went back and reprocessed it after pulling some dodgy subs out the stack. Blurred, out of focus etc.

Stretched it a bit more and much happier with this rendition.

The one thing I can't get a handle on is to how to make the stars really "pop". Any ideas anyone? I am sure there is a tutorial somewhere...

The weather is an amazing thing. 95% of Australia is cloud free, and yet it is bucketing down here in Brisbane. Was hoping to go to my Dark Site (Coulson, near Boonah). Aint gonna happen now.

Oh well

http://www.astrobin.com/103097/