Over eighty minutes of prime-focus exposure on this very faint target near Orion's belt. I still haven't got the guide camera yet, so this was manually guided the whole time on an EQ6 mount using an illuminated reticule eyepiece.
The problem now is saving from HUGE .Tiff's to reasonabley sized JPEG's for posting around on the net without suffering too many artefacts or becoming lossy......it looks much better as a Tiff than a Jpeg.
Any suggestions there?
Camera: Orion Starshoot Pro Color DSI
Telescope: Skywatcher ED120 APO
Guidescope: Skywatcher ED80 APO W/2X Barlow
Hope you dont mind baz.. I had a quick go at the colours...
For posting on the forums, you might want to make the images 800 pixels wide, this will allow you to post them without compressing the data so much.. Also, that one was compressed to 110kb... You're allowed 200kb, Use it! every little bit helps..
Due to the high compression of the image you posted, when I was bringing out colour, the flame's artefacts got worse and worse...
oh well.. anyways.. good going on a hard target...
Alex.
Cheers Alex, yeah, you are right that the compression stuffs it. I wonder how to save the image from the 30-odd mb that it is as a .fits or .tiff, so that you don't suffer the artefacts and loss for posting on the web.
I had a couple of goes at it. One at average and one at sum.
The color is straight from the camera, with very little change by me of saturation.
I searched images of this object and found there are many color variations. I quite like the red, although I have seen some very beautiful ones with the surrounding objects a striking blue.
I have left the scope and camera parked in situ, so I can go for another 80 minutes or more later and add them to it.
