After a long night of battling clouds, trying not very successfully to get RGB data of another object, I dashed this off just as dawn was lightening the sky (and the clouds were clearing - wouldn't you know). Only time for three short subs of L and one each of RGB, the last ones taken in a bright sky, so it's amazing anything came of it.
It's a lovely field so I'll try to do it properly later. The magenta patch at top is from the outskirts of eta carinae.
Bigger version here
It looks good just as it is. I sometimes get the impression that people labour under the premise that in order to get a great astropic, you need to take reams of subs for hours long sessions in order to achieve anything good. For many subjects that's not needed, especially stars. You can only bring out so much detail and colour before all those subs are nothing more than just a waste of effort. You can only collect so much data....if you wanted, you could collect 50 hours worth of subs, but they'd look no better than what you've got there. At least that's my opinion.
Very nice. A very pretty cluster I have not seen much of. Were those single 5 min RGB subs and 1 x 15 min Lum sub ?
Chris, the colour subs were only one five minute each 2x2. Luminance was three unbinned 5 minute subs, the last one in a very light sky. There was a price to pay for such short exposure time. If you examine the fine detail of the 100% version it's pretty scary. Fortunately for this bright object and at this image scale it's worked pretty well.
It looks good just as it is. I sometimes get the impression that people labour under the premise that in order to get a great astropic, you need to take reams of subs for hours long sessions in order to achieve anything good. For many subjects that's not needed, especially stars. You can only bring out so much detail and colour before all those subs are nothing more than just a waste of effort. You can only collect so much data....if you wanted, you could collect 50 hours worth of subs, but they'd look no better than what you've got there. At least that's my opinion.
There's something in this Carl. I spent the whole night gathering data for a faint fuzzy and then knocked this off in 30 mins. Astrophotographers can be an anal lot though and you definitely need the long exposures to get rid of noise when you're doing extreme stretching.
Cluster shots don't usually get my juices flowing but this one's a beauty Graeme! Beautiful rich star colour with just the right amount of halo and a hint of neb. Very nice image indeed!
