Step by Step processing of the Orion Nebula

I have gotten several requests as to how I processed my latest M42. Before I go into that I want to mention that my processing of this was done using Adobe Photoshop CS5 and includes a few different processes layered together. This is snowballed a little by M42 and its high dynamic range from the core to the outer dust, which adds layering to avoid blowing out the core.

I will include photos as I go so you can see how the steps progress. I started with several stacks as I took multiple exposure lengths. I took 5 different sets and ended up making 2 master stacks: one for the core with the 60s and 120s exposures, one with the 480s, 600s, and the 900s exposures for the rest. I would normally use each set as its own process and layer the 5 together but started with the two to try to save time and it turned out well so didn't go back and do the individual stack processes.

Here are the two master stacks:

Core Stack

Long Exposure Stack

I started with a process of the core stack. I didn't focus on stretching it too much as I was just going for the detail in the core as the other stack would cover all the rest of the detail. A few levels, curves, and the enhance dust lanes action from my set and here is the final core stretch:

I saved this and then pulled up the long exposure stack and for the first run-through on it I removed the stars (action in the set) and some additional fine tuning using the clone tool for the brighter stars resulting in a starless main stack. I also ran GradientXTerminator for the image as I had a little bit of gradient showing from shooting in the south where there is a town about 15 miles away:

From here I ran the Channel Process action followed by a couple small manual rounds of curves, as well as the dust & scratches filter to take care of a few of the star remnants that pop up when you stretch which left me here:

I opened up the Color Efex Pro plugin and used the Detail Extractor as well as the Color Contrast Range selections which brought out a good bit of the dust. I did a little additional touchup with Dust & Scratches and the clone tool for the star remnants again (especially for the two larger stars just at the bottom on M42): 

The colors were beginning to get a bit muted so I did some selective color boosting to bring out the reds that had gotten dulled down when I balanced the background with GradientXTerminator:

I ran my Enhance Dust lanes action and then pulled the image back into Color Efex Pro and did a mild Detail Extractor along with Tonal Contast and Pro Contrast: 

Now I opened the original stack and began processing with the Channel Process action and the GradientXTerminator plugin (basically started the processing the same way I did with the starless version):

I ran Enhance Dust Lanes and some selective color boosting via Match Color (Image>Adjustments). To do this I used the lasso tool, feathered, on the two nebulas individually so I could customize each one a little better. After this I ran the Reduce Star Size action followed by Boost Star Colors. I then did a small amount of curves:

Now I brought the starless processing up and made it a layer on top of the starred semi-process and set the blending mode to lighten to bring through the stretched dust of the starless version and the stretched stars of the lower layer. I pulled up the lens correction filter and used it to counter some of the coma I had from forgetting to use my field flattener. I cropped as well just a small bit to focus the attention more on the nebula and the immediate surrounding dust: 

I did a little more color boosting with Match Color and the Brighten Color & Sharpen action and used some layered contrasting on the dust. This helped to make the browns in the dust pop compared to the background and the colors and details in the nebula to show up a bit better:

Now I opened up the core processing and layered it into the core section of M42 (using this method) to show the detail of the core in the parts that got blown out in the longer exposure stretching. I toned down the blue a little around M43 as well since the previous color boost had made it a bit more of a focus than M42. Finally I ran the star color boosting action and ran Noise Ninja on the image to produce the final image: 

Here is a larger version of the final image: 

Bringing out the dust

I finally got a chance to shoot the Orion Nebula for the first time since I started imaging. After months and months of clouds and full moons during the only clear evenings I got a perfect evening. By far the best skies I have had here at the house since we moved here 3 years ago. I have had the scope set for Comet ISON (which didn't make its trip around the sun) so instead of putting my regular configuration back on, I decided to use my Nikon D7000 to shoot M42. I did a variety of sub-exposure times to compensate for the high range of lighting in this region so have subs ranging from 60 seconds to 15 minutes with a total of 8 hours. Instead of going into how I layered all of those to get the detail from core to dust I want to show just how much dust really was captured.

I started off using my normal processing steps (i.e. stack, run through my Photoshop Action set, color correct, some manual stretching, possibly GradientXTerminator, a few other actions, noise reduction) I did these and then used a plugin I have and occasionally use for my normal photography business called Color Efex Pro. There are a few of the steps in there I have found useful for certain astrophotography targets so gave them a try. Using Detail Extractor, Tonal Contrast, and Pro Contrast I was able to tweak out a bit more of the dust and get a nice looking final image (you can see higher res on my website).

Now is when I started to play some more. I could tell there was more dust to be tweaked out, but was getting to the manageable limit of noise for a final image, but that doesn't mean I couldn't play just to see what was there! I did a few more curves and then brought the image over to my Windows PC where I have another one of the Nik Software suite, HDR Efex Pro. I ran it through there just to see how much of the range I could pull out and was amazed. Obviously the noise overran the image, but the amount of dust in this area was phenomenal. Especially as I had always assumed one needed 15+ hours on it to pull that kind of dust out (and probably would to do that and not have the noise at full size). 

Even in this small size, you can start to see all the noise but the dust still looks quite impressive. Amazing what an unmodified DSLR camera, modest telescope, mostly dark skies, and 8 hours of exposure can show that you just can't see when looking up at night!

*note: I do not get anything from the external companies or plugins I mentioned above. I just include them and the links to explain to other astrophotographers what tools I used and help them find them easily if they wanted to check them out. I am not intending on promoting them, more just to be thorough in my processing explanations. 

A full week of astrophotography in the Haute-Alpes, France

I just spent a week down at Olly Penrice's astronomy mecca in Southern France. Crazy me drove down with all of my gear (the whole trip both ways and what driving we did during the day down there totaled 2100 miles!) and much to Olly's amusement set up my "portable" kit on his pad, desktop computer and all.


It was an absolutely gorgeous week and I got somewhere around 46.5 hrs of data total on 5 separate targets plus a few Milky Way shots with my DSLR on a tripod as I sat and watched the meteor shower and enjoyed the clear summer evenings. I do have some meteor widefields I have yet to stack and process as well as some more Milky Way shots, but here is the one I have done that I like the most.


I started on vdb126 as I love dark nebula regions and rarely image them. I did this for part of the first night and then moved on. It needed (and still does) some more data, but I had other priorities for most of the imaging time and just wanted something to show for this region.


Over the next 6 nights I worked on the remaining targets depending on where they were along the southern horizon, the slowly increasing moon, and how much data I had gotten on them yet. Here are the images I got over the week. I have a little more integrating and work to do on a few of them, but they are mostly processed.

Helix Nebula (LHaRGB):


Cocoon Nebula (LHaRGB):


Trifid Nebula (LRGB):


NGC 6559 (LRGB):


All were taken with my Orion EON80ED scope, Atik 314L+ camera, and Astronomik Filters while being piggybacked on my CPC800XLT on a wedge. More integration time details are available on my website although some of the time on the Helix I have stacked with a few other subs I got at a star party a while back which added to the 46.5 hour total from this week by 4 hrs making 50.5hrs for these 5 images. Could not have been a more perfect astrophotography week by my standards and it was nice to get the scope out and running again as it has just been collecting dust for the past 5 months or so as other things have taken priority. Well worth the year it took to book, plan, and actually get down to these amazing dark skies for a whole week of nothing but astrophotography by night and touring around the wonderful little towns in the area, hiking, and shopping during the day!

Blogging fell by the wayside

I have been incredibly busy since Christmas and unfortunately forgot to make any posts as a result. I have done some astrophotography and enjoyed the few clear nights England provided. Here are a few of the objects I imaged over the last few months:


vdb14 was a bit of a challenge for me. It is a faint bit of nebulosity in the constellation Camelopardalis. You don't see many images of it so I wasn't quite sure the orientation the camera should be in initially but that was sorted after one sub. The main problem is my scope/image train does not necessarily like broadband emissions, and in particular the blue wavelength. I get bloated stars on all blue and Luminance frames which make processing especially difficult. This is the reason I tend to stick to narrowband images for the time being. Despite these issues, I was thrilled with how it turned out.

vdb14

The all-too-familiar Horsehead Nebula. I hadn't imaged this since I first began astrophotography and thought it about time I hit it again. I wanted to get the depth and detail that Hydrogen-alpha provided but also not lose the blue reflection nebaul below the HH. As always in this region, keeping Alnitak (off frame to left) from ruining the photo is always a fun challenge. I think I managed to succeed fairly well with this final result.

Horsehead Nebula



I also decided I wanted to try out a few more planetary nebulas. I only got one managed with out few clear nights but it provided enough of a challenge. I shot it in narrowband so have no star colors, something which I would like to eventually remedy, but the depth and detail of the Owl Nebula itself made me happy. This is an easy nebula to have washed out and not get any of the inner detail/stars. It was a processing challenge to keep that and bring out the rarely seen outer OIII halo, but I am always up for a challenge (even if I do not always succeed). Here was the final result, although I do wish to revisit this in RGB to add some star colors and perhaps better nebula color as well.

M97 - Owl Nebula



I don't do many galaxies, mainly due to the blue bloat I mentioned earlier but am trying to expand my repertoire and so had a crack at M106 in RGB. A slew of new processing techniques and new "beta" actions I created helped me out with this one and although I had to do alot of work to keep the color manageable (esp in the blue wavelength) I think it paid off:

M106



And now to end on something in our solar system. I got a Philips SPC900NC webcam and a Televue 3x barlow to start to learn planetary imaging. Man, its tricky! I did manage to finally get Mars looking like Mars and will call that a successful planetary attempt even though it isn't the greatest and is still very grainy. Hopefully I will have more and will probably have a whole blog on planetary imaging at some point.

Mars - 29 Mar 2012

For the British winter, I did manage a decent amount of astrophotos among everything else I was doing, to check out more see my website at http://www.eprisephoto.com/astrophotography.

Hopefully will have a proper blog post soon!

Beta Actions available for testing

I have a few actions up for beta testing. I will do this occasionally as I am developing some for Annie's Astro Actions or just for my own personal use in processing (which is how these came about). I am considering adding them to the action set, but for now they are up for free for anyone willing to test them out and send me their thoughts/problems/suggestions.

In this first beta set are three actions: Hubble Palette Creation, Deconvolve, & Boost Star Color.
To read a short description of them and to download, please go to the new "Beta Action" page, coated here: http://www.eprisephoto.com/beta-actions . . . please remember to send me your notes if you download them!

Thanks!

Nikon D7000 for astrophotography: Review

Note: This review can be downloaded as a pdf at: http://www.eprisephoto.com/nikon-d7000.pdf

Although my first astrophotos were taken with a DSLR I quickly steered clear of DSLR astrophotography for a few reasons. First, I use my camera (at the time a Nikon D40) for my regular photography jobs and therefore was not going to get it “astro-modded”. Second, it was beyond noisy. Rather than having a field of stars with a few hot pixels, images were coming out as a field of hot pixels resembling a children’s paint splatter painting with a few stars and perhaps a galaxy thrown in for good measure. Dark frames helped, but even proper calibration only did so much for the overly noisy images. Third, I found a used ccd camera for a good deal and after trying it out once, despite the limited FOV from a small chip, found it much better in terms of image quality and lack of noise. I see fantastic results from DSLRs so I know it can be done, but my few experiences had been nothing more than an exercise in frustration. Fast forward a few years and I found myself upgrading to a Nikon D7000 camera. At the time, I had no thoughts of resuming DSLR astrophotography when I purchased it, but after a few months I decided to give it a go. 

Testing out the D7000: 

After attaching the D7000 to my scope and setting up the DSLR-USB IR sensor so I could set up a sequence via the computer I set about focusing. The D7000 has “Live View” which I was going to use for focus but once I switched to it I realized that while I could see the star I wanted to focus on, it was going to be too dim to accurately focus. I was able to get it close but then switched the live view off, put on the Bahtinov mask, and took a 2 second exposure. It was close enough that it only took me a few moments to fine tune the focus and lock the scope. I found the guide lines in the viewfinder when the shutter is pressed (which light up a dim red) very useful for framing my intended target of the night, M31. I set my ccd up as an autoguider and set “DSLR Shutter” (the program I use on the computer to control the IR sensor on the DSLR-USB IR to take a 10 min exposure and ... nothing. No shutter click to let me know the image had begun. I had the menu settings to “Quick Response Remote” but the D7000 has a roll bar underneath the left selector wheel (where you select M for manual, Auto, etc) that you also have to roll over to the remote picture. Once I had done that, I reset “DSLR Shutter” and off it went. 10 minutes later I checked the result and was pleasantly surprised. At ISO400 (I kept the ISO fairly low since the moon was going to be coming up soon and because I was used to a VERY noisy DSLR in the D40) the image was crystal clear. Andromeda looked great as did the stars and color across the whole image. Obviously the preview screen was always bound to look better than the full-sized image but no glaring problems were obvious so I set “DSLR Shutter” to take a set of 12 ten minute subs and let it shoot. I went back out 2 hours later to find that battery hadn’t even drained 1/4 of the way (also a problem I had with series’ with the D40) and I now had 13 subs of M31. I took a few darks for good measure and brought them all in to check out. 

D7000 Settings:

Before I get into the results of the evening I want to give you the settings and menus where I set those for the session. These are the only camera settings I changed, everything else was left to its default and no “in-camera noise reduction” was used. 

Exposure:	M (Manual)	Roll wheel on top left of camera
ISO:	400	Press “ISO” button on left of preview screen, turn roll bar in front of shutter/on-off button
Image Quality:	NEF (RAW)	MENU->Shooting Menu->Image Quality
Shutter trigger:	Quick-Response Remote	Two places: Shooting Menu->Remote control mode->Quick Response Remote, Secondary roll wheel on top left of camera->remote picture
Shutter Speed:	BULB	Right thumb roll bar

Results:

They say a picture is worth a thousands words, so I will show these results I will start by showing you what a single 10 minute dark sub looked like. All I have done to this was convert it from RAW to a tiff file and then used levels to stretch it so you can see the noise pattern (otherwise it looked completely black at this size).The darks look pretty good to me, especially for a 10 minute sub. Once I combined the 6 I took after my session I had a nice Master Dark to use for calibration. 

Before I did that I did a quick process of an uncalibrated single 10 minute sub of M31 just to get a “before”. This is a crop of the edge of the galaxy. No darks, flats, or bias frames and just a few processing steps comprised of levels and curves. 

I was floored that even a single 10 minute sub with a mild amount of stretching had such little noise! Granted it was a cool evening (40 degrees fahrenheit) but the inherent noise of the D7000 is exponentially lower than the older D40.  The noise was so low in the single stretched sub that I went ahead and did a stack of the uncalibrated subs. Hot pixel streaks were very minimal and in a pinch I believe I could even get away without shooting darks on a cool fall/winter imaging evening. 

I did, however, apply the Master Dark to the subs before I brought them over to be de-Bayered, aligned, and stacked for the final processing. I used several programs to compare how the image looked from the raw stack (Registar, Maxim DL, and Nebulosity), all three came out looking fairly decent but I used the Maxim DL stack for the final process as I found it did a better job on the balance of colors from the Bayer matrix. I used solely Photoshop CS5 for the post-processing, although I do have several plug-ins in addition to my own action set that I use for the processing. I ended up not using any noise reduction in the final process. 

Conclusions: 

For a “first light” for the camera, astrophotography-wise, I would have to say that the D7000 has completely changed my opinion of DSLR astrophotography. Not only does the camera produce crisp, clean images that are relatively noise-free (at least compared to my previous experience with DSLR astrophotography), but the efficient use of the battery allows an evening of shooting without having to worry about the battery going out mid-exposure. As I had this only a fairly low ISO setting (400) I might have to try to shoot some fainter nebulosity with a higher ISO in the future and expand my DSLR astro-gallery. All in all - a great camera in the day or night that I would highly recommend. 


Higher Res final image can be found here: http://www.eprisephoto.com/galaxy/h23732f43

Two years and a Pelican

Two years ago I could not even tell you what someone meant if they said "narrowband image" let alone expect that I would, in a relatively short amount of time, learn enough about astrophotography that I would be undergoing a project that would take all summer and result with a total of 3 entire days worth of exposure time for one photo. I have definitely been bitten by the astrophotography bug and although I am doing so on a very limited budget, am endeavoring to make the most of what I have.

On May 20th I started what would be this image. My first full-narrowband multi-panel mosaic began with the Pelican's head of the Pelican Nebula in Hydrogen-alpha. When I started imaging that night, I did not PLAN to be doing this mosaic. I just wanted to image the Pelican Nebula. As the evening went on and the sub-exposures stacked up I began thinking: I wasn't even getting the whole Pelican in this image and with my current setup this is as wide-field as I can get using the ccd camera - why don't I do a mosaic. I went in and began doing the calculations. For the field of view I was considering it would be around 18 panels, give or take, depending on just how far I wanted to extend it. Keep in mind that to do a full-narrowband image that would mean doing this mosaic 3 times over (note: after the Ha was completed I came up with an alternate way to do the SII & OIII - more on that later). On top of this, I am currently living in England. A country not exactly known for clear skies and in the summer there are very few hours of darkness due to the high latitude. Oh well! I might as well make this an extended project and off I went. I declared my intentions on the two astronomy forums I frequent just in case I began to let the enormity of this venture get the better of me they could keep me going. As luck would have it, and much to my surprise, I ended up getting quite a string of clear nights so was able to make relatively quick work of most of the Ha layer. Then things stalled for a while, mainly due to lots and lots of rain and clouds. It took me from May until August to finish up the Ha layer, which ended up being 18 panels just as I planned (17 completed it, but one was really noisy due to bad seeing and I didn't like how it merged with those around it so I did an additional one that overlapped part of the area and the surrounding panels).

I now had to do this all over again twice more ... or did I? I realized that the way I was planning on processing this meant that I would be using the Hydrogen-Alpha layer for all the detail and just needed the color-data from the OIII & SII as I was going to do a tone-map of all 3 for the colors. I had seen on my UK forum an adapter that allowed me to connect my Nikon lenses to my Atik ccd. I began to think this might just work and would cut down months on the total time I needed. I ordered the adapter and figured up the field of view requirement to determine which lens I needed with my small-chip ccd. Turns out that my 105mm Nikon lens would be perfect. I still wasn't convinced that it would work so once the adapter came in I spent a night doing a proof-of-concept with the OIII filter. I got a nights worth of data and came in to process a bicolor image to see if my plan would work. Voila! It DID! So instead of doing the 18 panels an additional 2 times I just needed a few clear nights each for the OIII & SII and would get the whole frame in each sub.

More rain, and a full moon delayed another week, but I was able to get around 7 hrs for each channel and went to process it to see if I would require more. I have determined I do not - that what I got would work well although normally the OIII & SII colors would still be a bit noisy at this point, since I was doing a tone-map that really didn't matter. So, at my 2 year anniversary of starting astrophotography my narrowband mosaic of the North American and Pelican Nebulas is complete. I have mapped the color in a modified Hubble Palette.

Here are the image details:

Object: North American Nebula & Pelican Nebula Image date: May 21, 2011-August 21, 2011 Image type: Full narrowband (SII, Ha, OIII) mosaic Camera: Atik 314L+ Guide camera: Starlight XPress Lodestar Scope: Orion EON 80ED Filters: Astronomik Ha, SII, & OIII Total Integration Time: 72 hours Integration time/channel: Ha-58 hrs 40 min, OIII-6 hrs 20 min, SII-7 hrs Mapping: Modified HST (SII, Ha, OIII), Luminance (Ha)

As soon as they finish uploading, the image will be available on my website under the Nebula section and a Zoomable to 1:1 version so you can see more details is located HERE. Currently only the Ha channel is located on the links. I will update this once the uploads are complete.

Zoomable version of my mosaic project

In case, like me, you are getting tired of seeing the overall image shrink in scale as I keep adding panels to this project, I have created a zoomable version that I will keep updated so you can zoom all the way to 1:1 if you want to see all the details in the North American and Pelican Nebulas that I am imaging. It is located here: http://mosaicproject.eprisephoto.com/

Summer project

Have you ever wanted to image for 8.5 days? I don't mean take a vacation and take a photo sometime throughout each day - I mean 8.5 days, 200+ hours, of cumulative exposure time for one photo. This is what I am currently in the midst of. I don't even want to add in set up, acquisition, focusing, tear down into the mix else I might faint from the amount of time I am working on this one shot.

The goal: a high resolution narrowband mosaic of the Pelican and North American Nebulas.

I am using my Atik 314L+ ccd camera and my Orion EON80ED scope to (hopefully) make a very high resolution large mosaic of the region. By my calculations and progress so far each filter will have 20 panels. I am currently half-way through the Ha, which I am shooting 10x1200s subs, binned 1x1 for each of those panels.

My thinking? Well, summers here in England have very short nights and I realized that combined with the infamous cloudy and rainy weather here I would be lucky to finish more than just a couple objects during the summer months. I was beginning the season with just a Ha shot of the main portion of the Pelican when I had this brilliant plan. Why not avoid frustration over having to drag out each image and plan that into the summer? Do a mosaic of the region, which with my small chip was the only way to image it anyways, and therefore when I do have clear nights, even though incredibly short on darkness, I already have all the planning done and just have to center on the next panel and off I go. Halfway through the first filter's panels I am wondering if I was completely insane when I set my mind out to do this! The 10 panels I currently have are roughly 77 inches square in size and so large I have to cut it down to 1/4 size just to load to Flickr and not hit their size maximums!!! No, I will not be printing a 10 foot poster of the final project, but the resolution for even a (what a normal person would consider) large print should be fantastic.

I still have the rest of the summer and beginning of fall until my targets rotate away for a few months so I am hoping that the remaining 167 hours are as promising as the first 33 were!

(Note: I have cropped the excess off of the right and bottom to where I plan the edges to roughly be for the final mosaic, I am still working left and up)

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). 

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

A Whale of a time getting to the Elephant Trunk

As those of you who know me probably know, I prefer nebulas to galaxies. No real reason, I just do. Not that I dislike galaxies but I enjoy imaging nebulae a lot more. So as galaxy season goes into full swing what do I pick for an object to image: the Elephant Trunk Nebula!! Being at a nice northern latitude I am day by day getting less "dark" to work with not to mention the infamous cloudy skies of England so when I saw on the forecast that I was supposed to get not one, but two perfect nights in a row I set up my scope and accepted the fact that I wouldn't sleep from Friday morning until Sunday night.

I have been looking forward to doing Elephant Trunk in narrowband since I started imaging, I just had to wait until I was good enough and I finally got SII and OIII filters. Of course, the Elephant Trunk doesn't rise high enough for me to begin imaging it until about 1257am so I had to come up with something to image as a warm-up. I was randomly slewing about while trying to decide and landed on the "Whale Galaxy" and figured, why not? Off I went on my imaging marathon.

Night 1 I imaged for 5 hrs on the Whale, mostly on luminance but a little red and blue binned as well and then switched to narrowband filters and moved on over to the Elephant Trunk and continued on until sunrise.

Night 2, same except I shot more luminance and a little red, blue, and evened out the green on the Whale followed by Hydrogen-Alpha only on Elephant Trunk.

It is now 55 hrs, give or take, since I last slept (although I did take a couple of quick naps when my daughter did during the day) but my marathon weekend is complete! I spent around 4 hrs processing today and have my final results.

First, the Whale Galaxy (and his companion), total LRGB integration time: 7 hrs (4:1:1:1)

and finally my Elephant Trunk in HST-mapped narrowband (SII, Ha, OIII). Total integration time: 10hrs (2:6:2), (I had a couple of hours of Ha from a week or two ago that I added in to this weekends data):

Astrophotography with a bright moon

Every month astrophotographers cringe at two words "full moon" as the great glowing orb in the sky makes it very difficult to image. Narrowband or photographing the moon are the two main options if you want to take advantage, as I do, of the few clear nights I get (even if it falls on a full or near-full moon). A few days past the full moon this month I noticed the moon rising with a beautiful orange color. I realized that it would pass right by the tree in my front yard where the cherry blossoms are currently blooming so I popped out with my camera to catch it.

This is a combination of two photos, taken at the same exposure but different focuses then merged so both the moon and the cherry blossoms would be in focus in the final product. The tree was lit up by an off camera flash, hand-held the lower left of the camera and set to fire at the last moment of exposure.

First Bicolor Narrowband Image

I have imaged various objects in just Ha before, but just got to use my OIII filter for the first time and am attempting my first bi-color processing. I am hoping to get more hours of both Ha and OIII in the coming days or weeks (whatever the weather will allow).

This is 3 hrs of Ha and an hour of OIII (yes I need more, I have trees which are preventing me from imaging this target for too long in any one night).

I think I have a method (albeit convoluted) that gets a result I like. Basically I have combined portions of all the various bicolor processing techniques I found. A little of Cannistra's, a little of JPM's tone-mapping, a little of my own mixture and PS actions and alot of layers and masks. For only 6 hrs of data (3hrs each of Ha and OIII) I think I have pulled out a good bit of detail and data, at least enough to make make me happy. I also found a balance of colors that I like (although I know with NB this is basically personal preference).

Here is also a crop of one edge of the nebula, I am happy with how this is coming along and am hoping with more data I will really get this region especially to "pop": 

Image Details: 
Imaging Camera: Atik 314L+
Imaging Scope: Orion EON80ED
Tracking & guiding scope: Celestron CPC800XLT
Guide Camera: Starlight XPress Lodestar
Filters: Astronomik Ha 12nm, Astronomik OIII 12nm
Location: fairly dark in the middle of nowhere Suffolk, England
Set temp on camera: -5C
Preprocessed & Stacked in Nebulosity
All post processing done in Photoshop CS2

Color to M51

Finally got another clear night and was able to grab 100 minutes each of RGB.

Here is the final (for now) LRGB version:
















You can see it larger on My Flickr

First image in England and of 2011

Despite a lot of rain and clouds I have gotten a couple (literally, only 2 since we moved here in December) of clear nights to image. Using my new autoguider (Starlight XPress Lodestar) I am now able to get much longer exposures. I kept these at 10 min subs although I could have gone longer, but didn't want to push it too much my first time autoguiding. I still need a few more nights to get color data, but I am happy with how the Luminance has turned out so wanted to go ahead and post it.

This is 4 hrs of Luminance data, spread over two nights (total of 24 x 600s). Unfortunately I didn't orient the camera exactly the same for one hour the 2nd night (oops!!! At least I noticed then and was able to fix it for the rest of the session) so the edges don't have quite as much detail and depth, though the main portion is all 4 hrs.


Details:
Scope: Orion EON80ED piggybacked on Celestron CPC800
Cameras: Imaging - Atik 314L+, Guide - Starlight Xpress Lodestar
Filters: Astronomik Luminance
Location: Suffolk, England
Sub details: 24 x 600s, preprocessed with flats and darks
Software: Nebulosity (preprocessing and stacking), Photoshop CS2 (post-processing)

Full frame:

Crop of central area: 

December 2010's total Lunar Eclipse

As it would so happen, I moved out of the US just before the total eclipse of 2010. Amidst the clouds and current snowy/icy weather in England I was not expecting to be able to see anything, especially coupled with the fact that here in England totality would begin just before the moon set and the sun rose for the day - what timing!

It turns out I lucked out bright and early on the morning of the 21st as it was unusually clear in the sky, albeit incredibly cold. I was able to see the eclipse start and went out every 10 minutes or so until totality. Just as dawn brightened the sky I was able to watch the moon completely disappear into the shadow of the Earth. Unlike my counterparts in the States who would get to see a lovely red color to the moon during this, I literally just got to watch the moon disappear - it was pretty neat.

My telescope and tripods are all currently packed away as we still havent moved into our new place, so I just shot a few handheld images throughout. No fantastic shots, but at least I was able to document the first total lunar eclipse to fall on winter solstice in more than 400 years!

Click here to view my Eclipse sequence larger

Comparison of 1st year of astrophotography

What can you learn in your first year of astrophotography .... well, a picture (in this case 6) is worth a 1000 words .... Here is a comparison of my very first astrophotos, fully processed to my abilities when I took them on the left one year ago to the ones I took over the past month and fully processed.

Make sure you view a Larger Version so you can see just how awful my first ones were :-) (though at the time I was happy that I was getting anything)

Yes, I have upgraded equipment, which definitely helps, but technique and processing skills have greatly increased as well.

I have cropped and adjusted the scale so they are comparable in size for comparison purposes, otherwise, no additional editing was done on the photos from my processing a year ago (ugh!)

This comparison just goes to show what a learning curve this hobby has and how much progress you can make in just one year if you keep at it! Hopefully this can encourage some of you just starting out and getting frustrated with what you are getting compared to those who have been doing it for many years!!!

Finally back into the night

Its been a few months of clouds and rain and so I havent gotten to get out to observe or image in quite some time. My local astronomy group (San Antonio Astronomical Association) had an outreach outing at Garner State Park this past weekend and the forecast was iffy, but had the possibility to be nice so I packed all my gear and drove out for it. We were treated to a gorgeous night free of clouds until around 245 in the morning. Each scope had lines of people, adults and kids alike, excited to see planets, globular clusters, nebulas - basically whatever we would show them. It was a great time.

About 11 pm the crowds left and I was able to start imaging. I had already selected the Trifid Nebula so retweaked my alignment since it had gotten bumped with all the people around the scope and began imaging. I got a good amount of Luminance, Red & Green data. I had just started the Blue channel when the sky got completely socked in. Once I got home the next day I ran through my normal processing except I had to take the two blue frames I got before the clouds and some tweaking with the Green channel to create a false blue to see what I had ... despite the false blue channel, I am happy with the result.

I do plan to get out and get some proper blue sometime soon, but for my first chance at imaging since April, it made me happy to be back out with the scope.

NGC 3718 ... the comparison of dark versus urban skies

My latest project was to test the limits of imaging a) in the city and b) without an autoguider on my wedge-mounted scope. I chose NGC 3718 as I dont see many pictures of it and I think it looks cool and it has not only the main galaxy but alot of faint wispies that I figured (rightly) that I wouldnt be able to pick up in the city. I planned this so I had a week or two here in San Antonio to work on it and get data before my vacation to Big Bend where I would be able to get DARK DARK skies to get data for it there.

I found out that I can get 10 minute subs with no autoguider with my piggybacked EON (piggybacked on a CPC800) with slight tweaking over a week, though I kept most of my subs to 250sec as I still need to do a decent PEC training.

I also determined that no matter how many hours you get in the city it cant compare to a few hours in the ink black skies of Big Bend! Here is the comparison .... 


the first is 7 hours worth of Luminance data taken from San Antonio, mostly all 250sec subs, with a few 500sec subs in there. 

The second is the original 7 hours of data and then 2.5 more hours from Big Bend added to it. 

My the difference a few hours with absolutely no light pollution can make!!!! SO many more stars and now I was able to pull out the faint wispies I wanted to!

Now, just to get color to add to it next month when I head out to West Texas again for a star party to get more imaging time in dark skies ....

Here is the info for the shots:
Scope: Orion EON 80ED piggybacked on a CPC800
Camera: Atik 314L+
Autoguider: NONE
Filter: Astronomik Luminance
Exposure time: Image 1: 7 hrs, Image 2: 9.5 hrs
Sub length: 250 sec, (a few thrown in at 500 sec) 


Really makes the case for getting rid of light pollution and bringing back our dark skies!!!!