About the Blog

This blog contains recent projects, activities, and musings about astrophotography and space, to view my main webpage with prints for sale, final images, and Annie's Astro Actions, please visit: www.eprisephoto.com

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Monday, May 9, 2011

Eastern Veil and building an image

My latest image project has been the Eastern Veil Nebula in narrowband. I shot the SII and OIII first, both binned 2x2 and with 20 min subexposures, followed by two nights of Ha, binned 1x1 also with 20 min subs. I used a custom variant of JPM's tonemapping (http://www.astroanarchy.blogspot.com/) to assemble the channels and then some more color tweaking once it was assembled. I put together a gif to show the process of the image build (Click to view the animation): 


















And here is the final result. 10.67 hrs total integration time (SII: 8x1200, 2x2)(OIII: 8x1200, 2x2)(Ha: 16x1200, 1x1). 



Monday, May 2, 2011

Iris Nebula

I have been wanting to do some dark nebula imaging for a while, but had read about how difficult processing would be for such images so I held off for a while until I had the means to do longer subs. Now that I have an autoguider my sub length is sufficient so I had a go at NGC 7023, also known as the Iris Nebula. These were imaged using a borrowed Newtonian astrograph from a dark sky location.

LRGB image integration time is: 234:60:60:60
Calibrated and stacked in Maxim DL and Processed using Annie's Astro Action in Photoshop CS2

Processing did take a bit more work than normal LRGB images, but using multiple layers I was able to get some good depth in the dust and was able to pull out some nice color (at least in my opinion)

I am very happy with how it turned out and am looking forward to doing some more dark nebulous areas in the future.

For now, I am moving on to a multi-night narrowband project . . . more to come soon

Monitor Calibration

Monitor Calibration
The grayscale above presents 24 shades of gray from pure white to solid black. If you cannot see all 24, your monitor needs calibration to view the astrophotos correctly: I recommend the site linked in the image