Helix Starless

[gregbradley]

Keeping with the starless nebula theme here is the Helix Nebula which is mostly Ha 500 minutes for a total of 10 hours LRGB plus Ha.
STL11 and RCOS 12.5 inch at F9 on a Tak NJP mount from my dark site a couple of months ago.

I used a tip from the Photoshop tips to remove the bulk of the stars and healing tooled out the rest.
The tip was to make a layer and blur it with gaussian blur to remove the stars. I used a layer/hide all to do this and
brush out the stars. Then use healing tool set very small so as not to affect the surrounding neb too much.

http://upload.pbase.com/image/100759044

Greg.

[leon]

Greg that is a hell of a nice effort, everyone to their own I suppose, but I rather like the Helix with a few stars in and around it, having said that, it is a top shot.

Leon

[AlexN]

PHWOAH!! nice shot mate.. Image scale and level of detail is stunning.

I like the narrow crop too..

Well done..

[bluescope]

Sorry Greg, lots of work and effort but I don't really like all this starless stuff. Astrophotography to me is about capturing the wonders of the sky, as they are, to the best of our abilities. When we start deleting stars etc we are starting to mimmic fashion photography in my opinion i.e. digital nip and tuck. I have no problem with removing light gradients and noise from images and the obvious levels, curves, saturation adjustments but I think that's about where it should stop.
I would like to see this image with it's stars in tact Greg, do you have a version to post ? I think it will be just as impressive as you have captured very good data.



p.s. I just checked you website and found what I think is the original with stars and it looks great !

[Matty P (Matt)]

Greg that is a superb image.

I quite like starless images but really depends on what object it is. It really helps to bring out more detail in the neb but I like looking at astrophotos with stars.

Very well done on a fine image.

[Bassnut (Fred)]

Excellent Greg, and nice neb extension

[Alchemy (Clive)]

superb extension to the nebula outer, would like to see it with stars as i feel possibly the fine detail has been lost, fascinating image though.

[Ric]

A fine image Greg, I find the latest starless trend very interesting as it definitely presents a new view of the old favourites. I think maybe the central star could have been kept to give the image a bit more depth.