Adding to M42

[PeterEde (Peter)]

Early morning. Better alignment 16 shots total 26 min. Exp length between 60 to 120 sec
Also longer processing. Tried a better colour balance than the last
New
https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5560/...f321ac00_b.jpg
M42-Orion by Peter Ede, on Flickr

Old
https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5565/...87b5e338_b.jpg
M42-Orion by Peter Ede, on Flickr

[raymo]

Much prefer the old one Peter, the blue gradient has overpowered everything, washing out the red in the nebula. Just my opinion.
raymo

[PeterEde (Peter)]

I'll look at reprocessing. Fair bit of colour balancing to try negate anything overpowering. There's more nebula in this than the blacker process. Maybe crank up the reds a little.
But I'll probably do another hour on it tomorrow morning

[cometcatcher (Kevin)]

Definitely more data in the new one, it's smoother. But yeah as Ray mentioned the gradient and colour needs some work. Nice shot though.

[PeterEde (Peter)]

I've seen discussion before re colour of night sky.
Is it black, dark grey or in this case a shade of dark blue?
Preference here is for black I guess.

[raymo]

The consensus seems to be a very very dark blue that pretty much looks black, unless looked at alongside a picture that actually is black, when the difference can be seen.
raymo

[cometcatcher (Kevin)]

Personally, for most DSO's I prefer the background to be colour neutral but not black clipped. It depends on the subject matter also. Comets tend to be imaged with lighter backgrounds since they have such delicate tenuous tail structure.

[LightningNZ (Cam)]

I'm with Kevin. I go for a roughly grey background with a mean of around 20/65535 levels (16 bit). The variance of the background will be around 10-15 levels generally with good data.

Photon signals are Poisson distributed - there is no such thing as a black background - so to making the background black is not only jarring to look at, it's also technically incorrect.