Carina Nebula

[Xeteth (David)]

After weeks of rubbish weather in Melbourne, last night finally provided the opportunity to get out and let me test whether I'd nailed my backfocus. All sorts of distortion was evident in my previous couple of images and I hadn't been sure why - until I dug deeper and found my backfocus was entirely wrong - got a spacer kit (thanks Sidereal Trading!) and off I went.

From the first sub that came through I knew that there was great improvement, stars were nice and round throughout most of the image (although possibly a little off at the edge, more fine tuning is required).

19 x 5 Min Lights
30 Darks
30 Flats
Superbias

Pixinsight:
Preprocessed, AutomaticBackgroundExtraction, BackgroundNeturalization, MultiscaleLinearTransform (noise reduction), HistogramTransformation, MultiscaleLinearTransform (sharpening).

The star color is a bit off (seems quite blue), I'm still learning masks etc but I'm guessing that's my best bet to target and adjust those. Certainly more integration would help with everything else, I plan on building this one up over the next couple of months.

Some detail lost in the upload, link to full res version - https://astrob.in/wjd5b4/0/

As always, tips/tricks/comments welcome, enjoy!

[mynameiscd (Andy)]

Fantastic image David,
You have picked up some very fine detail and the stars are really sharp and round.
I like the colour as its more realistic as it tends to be too red most images.
A real keeper.
Cheers
Andy

[Startrek (Martin)]

David
Nice wide field capture of our great southern gem, focus is good and colours are spot on
Well done !!

[skysurfer]

Nice picture !


Was there no smoke haze ?

[Xeteth (David)]

Thanks all for the kind words, thrilled to have everything working well finally so I can take some real shots!

There was no smoke haze down in Melbourne, thankfully we've escaped the majority of the fires thus far.