Hybrid Image 5 hrs Luminance ST8XME - 5 hours RGB Data ST2000XCM
Plus 2 hours RGB Data ST8XME - Astrodon Gen 1 Filters Total 12 hours
SkyWatcher 120ED Equinox on Losmandy Gemini G-11
Data Gathered over 4 nights using CCD Autopilot 4
Processed in MaximDL V5 and Photoshop CS3
You have certainly tamed the noise and without imparting too much of a plastic look either so that's good, it's also quite deep but I'm not too sure about the purple hue in the outer dust envelope though..? To me this is giving the image a narrow band image feel as opposed to a natural RGB look. Even with the purple (after all, that's right, look at narrow band images ) it is still a great shot regardless
Lovely image and representation of this area. Colours are great and you even have the orange stars in the area. Nice image. Pity about the top left corner.
Mike - The purple colour wasn't planned it just arrived - I thought I had screwed up something again but when I thought about it - it is just possible that it may be real. The image is deep - some of the luminance images are 20 min with a ST8 - the blooms had to be seen to be believed - they were the full length of the chip - also taken were 2 hrs of HAlpha and 2 hrs of OIII - but they were not used - original intention was to boost the faint outer ring nebula using the OIII - only problem is that there is very little OIII in the nebula at all. The outer ring shows up in the Ha exposures and my guess that the rest is HBeta (Blue) hence the purple colour. As for the noise - that problem was easy to solve - the first time I over processed the image - it also destroyed data - the second time I only processed where necessary - My P/S skills are only minimal but I am learning all the time - I think my images are improving.
Paul - The black line up the top is the result of not cropping the image - I didn't want to risk cutting the bright star in half - The image is a composite of 4 colour images and 4 luminance images all taken over 4 differnt nights over a period of 2 months - I have to pull my telescope down each night so the camera was not exactly aligned each time - a rotator would have cured that problem and it is on my wish list - but I'm still short a few Brownie points after buying the telescope.
Not totally convinced buuuut, yep, you might be right Geof
I find that when reviewing an image first impressions are not the most important, quite the contrary, I need to look at an image for a while and come back to it a couple of times to let it grow on me, when I do this it seems to massage the percieved anomolies or faults (unless they are really obvious ones) and your image is no exception
Very nice image Geoffrey, The colour looks good and so does the other asthetic items. The image is BIG, Very BIG. Any little fault will be magnified very well and nothing is glaring in this one.
Well done.
) it is still a great shot regardless 
