Great Nebula taken with DSLR

[scorpio1155]

Hello... This photo of the Great Nebula in Orion's sword (Theta Orionis) was obtained with my 300mm f/8 William Optics refractor riding piggy-back on my 12-inch Meade LX200. It was my usual formula of 12, five-minute subexposures aligned and stacked. Camera control, and some processing was done using Images Plus. By the way, the effective focal length of the system was 480mm thanks to the 1.6 crop factor of my 500D.

[madjack]

Wow! thats amazing....

[Toxic Coolaid]

Are you taking Darks and Flats to use with Deep Sky Stacker?

[spit]

your processing gives alot of color noise and oversaturation

[Celestron]

Got alot of detail . Since you have Image Editing OK i worked on the noise some in Cs5 . If you don't like it let me know and i'll remove it .

[scorpio1155]

Got alot of detail . Since you have Image Editing OK i worked on the noise some in Cs5 . If you don't like it let me know and i'll remove it .

No, no, please leave it. I like it better than my processing. I still think that some of my biggest challenges are the blue halos around bright stars. Thank you for offering your version!

[scorpio1155]

Are you taking Darks and Flats to use with Deep Sky Stacker?


Darks yes, flats no... I haven't quite figured out how to do them effectively yet. I have a white board that I illuminate and shoot when gathering flats for the ST-7XME (when shooting a focal length of 1524mm), but the board isn't big enough to use with the 480mm (300mm with 1.6 crop factor) coupled to the DSLR.... Hmmm....

[alexg212]

Got alot of detail . Since you have Image Editing OK i worked on the noise some in Cs5 . If you don't like it let me know and i'll remove it .

Can I send you some of my pictures!!?!!? ;) just kidding that is great, I wouldn't have thought that was possible.

[Celestron]

... my biggest challenges are the blue halos around bright stars. Thank you for offering your version!

You can help that with a Minus Violet Filter in refractors . Check these out by Lumicon but i'm sure there are other brands .

http://www.lumicon.com/telescope-accessories-list.php?cid=25&cn=Minus+Violet+Filters

[Celestron]

I wouldn't have thought that was possible.

I use Topaz DeNoise (http://www.topazlabs.com/products.html) but some others use LR3 but it's a bit more complicated .

[alexg212]

I use Topaz DeNoise (http://www.topazlabs.com/products.html) but some others use LR3 but it's a bit more complicated .

Thanks, I think I'll give that a try!

[RustyHammer]

Nice work ... both of you!!!

[MidnightSun]

Processing is as important as the shots themselves. I never thought there would be so much involved AFTER the shot is taken...............Nice one by the way.

[hairy_moth]

Pretty cool!

[Toxic Coolaid]

Darks yes, flats no... I haven't quite figured out how to do them effectively yet. I have a white board that I illuminate and shoot when gathering flats for the ST-7XME (when shooting a focal length of 1524mm), but the board isn't big enough to use with the 480mm (300mm with 1.6 crop factor) coupled to the DSLR.... Hmmm....

For Flats just shoot the sky when it's clear. I usually take 50-60 which gives me a nice even master flat. It does not matter that the sky is blue, you just don't want clouds passing by.

[dhanson]

I just took a crack at processing this straight in Photoshop with no plugins. I tried to get rid of as much noise as possible, while enhancing the detail in the core of the nebula. I'll post the steps I took after the image. Criticism welcome - I'm still learning this stuff:

http://just.razzi.me/photos/523805/47fd193.jpg

So here's what I did with the image:

- Filter->Noise->Reduce Noise. I used 'advanced' and played around with the sliders for each individual color channel, looking for the ones that had the most impact on noise. I also did a bit extra on the blue channel to help soften the blue fringes around the stars.

- Image->Adjustments->Shadows/Highlights. I noticed the central region was blown out, so I turned the highlights way down to get back as much detail in that area as I could, then I increased shadows to restore the overall contrast.

- Filter->Sharpen -> Unsharp Mask. I wanted to recover some of the detail in the nebula, so I used an unsharp mask with a radius of 3.4 pixels and about 75%. Threshold of 1. Any more than that, and JPEG artifacts started to appear.

- Filter->Noise->Despeckle. This helped remove a bit of the artifacting from the unsharp mask.

Filter->Noise->Reduce Noise - I ran another pass of the noise filtering I did above, because after tweaking the sharpening and contrast more noise showed up.

- Image->Auto Tone. The whole image looked like it had a bluish cast, so I took a chance with Auto-tone and it seemed to restore colors more in line with that I'm used to seeing with the Orion Nebula.

That's it. All in all, about 15 minutes of work. But I don't know if this is the right way to do this - the repeated sharpening/noise reduction passes seem somehow wrong. If anyone has suggestions for how to improve the pattern of steps, I'd be happy to hear it. But overall I think the result is pretty cool.