Hi - New member - I have sat on the sidelines for a while - I am in the process of building an observatory - Attached is a test image I took in early March - http://www.pbase.com/loc46south/image/110428907
Hybrid image - Luminance ST8 with colour from ST2000XCM
Excellent Geoffrey. 7 hours on an open cluster is keen! I enjoy the colours you've portrayed - very aesthetic. I agree with Roger that a mild application of USM would make the stars really pop and come to life in this image. It certainly doesn't need much however as clusters don't often lend themselves to sharpening well. Maybe perform the sharpening on a new layer to give you better control and really drop back the opacity of the layer to around 40%. Well done. Good to see you've come out of the wood work. I recall seeing some of your posts over at Yahoo and hope you'll show us some more.
Yet another Geoffrey ( even spelled correctly too )
I really like the colours you have captured there.
It is also great to see a cluster that I dont see imaged very often.
This is a beautiful cluster which I always show to " the public" when I attend Astronomy nights or help at the Local Observatory when they have a crowd.
I think you have done it justice Geoff, and what about all those stars and the colours...Wow.
HI - thanks to those that took the time to view and to comment.
The image is my first attempt at using Photo Shop so processing is minimal - I agree there is some star bloat but it was blowing a howling nor wester at the time and outside temp was 17 deg C - FWHM was 5.7 - (All our hot disturbed air comes from Aussie) - My usual weapon of choice is a C9.25 with a W/O 0.8 Focal Reducer but this time I used a Skywatcher Pro 100ED.
Not that I am blaming the scope - optically its excellent - so much so I've just bought its bigger cousin the SW120ED from Andrews Comms - it should be here soon hopefully.
Agree with others about the stars - the conditions you describe definitely wouldn't have helped. Not sure if you added extra saturation or use the "enhance star colours" photoshop action by Noel Carboni? They look a little too aqua but you've done a great job capturing a beautiful area of the sky.
Thanks great image Geoffrey I love the depth & colour - not normally seen in images of this cluster. Agreeing with others - if anything, processing some slightly crisper stars would be nice but that's more a personal taste thing IMO. Well done!
Hi all - Thanks again for looking and comments - any constructive comment is helpful - I have reprocessed the image - tightened up the stars a little and cleaned up and toned down the background - I have also tried to correct the blue stars colour and removed a slight green cast from the whole image - anything else will have to wait until I can upskill myself with Photoshop.
- My usual weapon of choice is a C9.25 with a W/O 0.8 Focal Reducer but this time I used a Skywatcher Pro 100ED.
