More love and joy on Christmas Day from Roma, QLD

[zardos123 (Brad)]

they are seriously dark skies, i find that after i go out to the really good skies i have withdrawal symptoms for a while, great shots, ya gotta be happy with that!!

regards brad

[naskies (Dave)]

Thanks guys!

David - keeping an EQ6 as a "backup" mount for the AT seems a bit excessive

Roger - 114 degrees diagonal field of view I was about to sell mine from lack of use, then started learning how to make good compositions with such a large FOV. Now it's one of my favourite lenses!

Brad - unfortunately, I think you're right about withdrawal symptoms I look out the window at my bright pink featureless sky here and just get depressed!

[shelltree (Shelley)]

Wow, what beauties mate! I particularly love no.1 and no.2! So much detail and the Magellanic Clouds are so nice and bright as well! Looks like you had a great night

[naskies (Dave)]

Thanks Shelley, I'm glad you managed to catch the comet in the end too.

Since the 14 mm wide field shot has been so popular, I scraped up all my test images from the depths of Lightroom, threw them into Photoshop's Automerge (panorama) function just to see what would happen. The initial result was pretty messy, but it showed potential - so I fiddled around with different combinations... and wow!

Here's a 175 degree panorama (measured horizontally, along the horizon) generated from four test shots and one of the "real" photos:

* 1x 121 sec f/4 ISO 3200 at 14 mm taken at 1:25 am
* 4x 301 sec f/4 ISO 800 at 14 mm taken at 3:04 am, 3:13 am, 3:37 am, and 3:43 am

One of Scorpius' pincers just peeks above the horizon on the left, as the Orion constellation is about to set on the right. If you look carefully, you can see that Barnard's Loop and some of the H-a nebulosity near Canopus is faintly visible (unmodded camera).

A larger 2000 pixel wide image can be found here.

Hope you like it!

[shelltree (Shelley)]

Holy moly, that is just stunning! I love it!

[Adelastro1 (Wayne England)]

Very nice Dave! It gives you an idea of the scale of the comet, and everything else for that matter! Nice colours too.

[naskies (Dave)]

Thanks Shelley and Wayne.

Well, after finally catching up on a bit of sleep I got around to processing my original wide field photo at high resolution with a manual alignment and stack of 3x 301 sec frames - I found another one that I'd missed earlier - in Photoshop with a drizzle factor of 3x.

Processing 21 megapixels x 9 (drizzle) x 3 subs = 567 MP using my 2009 era 13" MacBook Pro was a bit of a struggle, but it survived. The drizzling and third sub resulted in a noticeably smoother and richer image than the one in my original post.

I threw a roll of 24-inch wide Hahnemuhle Monet Canvas into the printer and ran the photo off as a 24x38 inch (61x96 cm) print. The attached pic shows the actual image pixels (left) and a quick iPhone snap of the canvas being printed (right). Hooray for colour-managed workflows The comet itself ended up about 20 cm long in the print.

I just have to seal the print with a protective spray, send it off to my framer for stretching, put a nail or two into a wall, and she'll be all good to go

[naskies (Dave)]

I was inspired by RB's contrasty comet photos, so I did some black & white repros - larger versions HERE and HERE.

I like the B&W version of #1 (landscape) since the conversion puts the visual emphasis on the comet, Milky Way, and Magellanic Clouds rather than the twilight/airglow/stars.

#2 in this repro is actually a stack of 17 subs, but the trailing due to the lack of tracking combined with the wide angle distortions doesn't work for me