Lagoon and Trifid - First Light, and First Post

[Jesse.B]

Hello,

I acquired myself a shiny new CCD for Astrofest last month. I also figured it might be a good idea to start posting my results.

Enjoy and feel free to offer feedback.


Mount: Orion EQ-G driven by EQMod
Guiding: 50mm guidescope, Orion Starshoot and PHD2
Optics: RC10 steel, stock focuser
Camera: Atik 11000 Mono
Processing: PixInsight

Lagoon: LRGB, each channel 17x300s
Trifid: LRGB, each channel 14x300s

[Retrograde (Pete)]

Welcome Jesse.
Lovely first pics with great detail. Very well done - particularly at that image scale!


As far as feedback is concerned mostly what they really need is a bit more colour. I suspect that's nearly all in the processing which you'll get better at with practice.
I don't use PixInsight myself but I'm sure there are others here who can offer some advice on that front.

[Atmos (Colin)]

Looks like there is a lot of really nice detail in there, a bit more colour saturation and you'll have some fantastic images there

[Somnium (Aidan)]

Great first post

The first image has a lot of JPEG artefacts, do you have a high def version?

[Jesse.B]

Thankyou for your thoughts Pete, Colin, Aidan

I'll have to revisit these images and see about getting a bit more out of them in processing.

I had to be pretty brutal to get my images below 200KB for the post last night. Lesson learned - include external links to images in posts.

Here are some slightly better quality files:
http://astrob.in/full/211343/0/
http://astrob.in/full/211345/0/

[Somnium (Aidan)]

You can also scale the image to reduce the size

[RickS (Rick)]

Hi Jesse,

Welcome... that's a great start.

A fairly simple way to boost colour saturation in PI is to extract a copy of the Luminance from your colour image, use HistogramTransform to clip the blacks, apply this as a mask to your image and then use CurvesTransform to boost the Saturation curve.

The advantage of this technique is that the saturation boost is applied more strongly to bright areas and not at all to the background (which you removed by black clipping the mask.)

Cheers,
Rick.

[Jesse.B]

Thanks Rick. I'll try that out.