My best from Wee Jasper - Eta Carinae

[iceman (Mike)]

Hi all

Here is my best image salvaged from my camping weekend at Wee Jasper. It's my first deep-space image of Eta Carinae - something i've wanted to capture for ages but I don't get to see it from home for another few months (trees).

The first exposure was taken on the Friday night (only 1) before clouds ruined any chance of further imaging that night. However in a nice 2 hour clear spell on Saturday night, I added to the Eta Carinae data and was able to get a total of 50 minutes exposure for this image.

Unfortunately my drift alignment was rushed on the first night, and so the longer exposures had some rotation, resulting in warped corners in the final stack. Also, even though I was guiding, the seeing was absolutely terrible so the guiding wasn't as good as it could've been.

I left the camera attached to the scope in the same orientation all weekend, so was able to use the one set of flats for all of the images that weekend. Definitely saved time in capturing flats and calibration later on.

Room for improvement, but overall i'm happy with this image. But i've been staring at it for so long i'm just not sure anymore

- Scope + Camera: ED80 + WO 0.8x reducer + unmodded Canon 350D.
- Mount: EQ6
- Guiding: Guided through 400mm f/5 refractor, using DMK21AU04 + PHD software
- Lights: 10x 180s + 4x300s, flats calibrated. Most at ISO800, though a few at ISO1600.
- Darks: ICNR used
- Flats: 15x 1/3s median combined
- Processing: ImagesPlus for Flats Calibration and Deep Sky stacker for registration and stacking. Photoshop for everything else.

I used layer masks to reveal more detail in the keyhole, and also did some selective high-pass filtering in a layer mask to sharpen the edges of some of the nebulosity.

Sorry for the essay. Anyway, feedback is welcome.

UPDATED: Updated the image to remove some of the green.

Thanks for looking.

[EzyStyles (Eric)]

very nice mike alot of details . slightly greenish with the background on my monitor.

[davidpretorius]

well done mike, it must be very pleasing.

one day i will do this too

[Tamtarn]

Great amount of detail Mike, especially in the top left corner.

But the background is very green on our monitors also.

[iceman (Mike)]

I can see the green background now too - I thought I reduced it enough but it's very apparent now. I'll re-work and re-post shortly.

[iceman (Mike)]

Ok here's an updated one. I'll update the first post too.

Hopefully this is better.

[Ingo]

Great data and work, but in my opinion it looks very over saturated and looks like the contrast was boosted up A LOT. Looks very unnatural.

Looks great otherwise!

[Rodstar (Rod)]

What an amzing starfield. Choking with stars!

[Dietmar]

hey Mr. Planet goes deeper into DSI (-:
very nice result Mike!