This is really promising Bert. I'm surprised nobody has thought about it before (as far as I know). Why spend $$$ on an apo, when a good achro and set of filters will do the same job?
Geoff
Great depth and detail there.
In the Combined colour and narrowband image, M42 looks cavernous.
Like a bowl off gas with the trapezium at the bottom of the bowl - very nice.
Doug
great shot Bert. Question about HDR, thats same as layered masking in PS2 right? if it is, personally i think doing layered masking in PS2 has more control over the area which you want to mask.
Thanks all for your comments. I am just making the best out of my light polluted site. I figured if I have to use filters why not go all the way. The basic premise behind the method I am developing is to overcome the light pollution and still get 'natural' looking colour of very faint objects. As far as I am concerned every image is experimental as it gives me ideas what to try next.
This is a work in progress and I still have some details to work out. So far I cannot see why it wiil not succeed. I just thought I would put this image up so I could get some initial feedback.
All that faint noise you see outside the Orion nebula complex is very faint nebulae and dust. With longer and many exposures all the detail will be revealed (I hope).
I used EasyHDR Eric. It only costs about $40 to get a registered version.
The trick is to produce identical fields using RegiStar of the different exposure stacks and then there is no need to use the very poor (for stars) alignment that comes with EasyHDR.
Wow that first shot is a great piccy - it needs slight processing to reveal just what a fine shot you did - with simple dark point reset (leveling the histogram in Photoshop CS2 - a 20 second exercise) your shot becomes:
M42 is just a test,mainly to see if I could get 'natural' colour with narrowband data. The use of EasyHDR will also give me the full dynamic range of the target object visible in the one final image. Next on the list some supernova remnants in Vela when they are high enough.
Looks very promising Bert...colors look fairly close to what I expect from a normal RGB image. I agree that would be a great way to go deep where lots of LP is unavoidable. The achro seems to do a rather good job at it considering how bad a 150mm f/5 would be. Still shows some minor CA around the brighter stars which I don`t know why?
With many exposures you would end up with a very nice image but I reckon your ED100 would be the instrument of choice.
Look forwards to further refinements and updates!
cheers Gary
Here is last nights effort. Managed to get frames for 1min,4min and 8min for both HA and O3. Using the 150mm achromat.
I summed each of the two 8 min frames to get one 16 min for HA and O3.
Easyhdr used the two sets to give me two images for HA and O3.
Recombined in IP.
