orion and the horsehead

Got in about 1.5 hours on this widefield of the horsehead, flame, and orion. I used a

Sigma 70-300 APO at 200mm F5
300 seconds x 18, iso 800
8 darks
30 flats

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …70374000@N08/12​329233754/

Wow, that looks great for only 1.5 hours! Nice job

I know it's a work in progress for you. I like it so much I messed with your image a bit in PS. The clouds that that you captures are great. Since you done have "IMAGE EDITING OK" on I won't post it unless you say it's ok.

Mo

Toxic Coolaid wrote in post #16674979
I know it's a work in progress for you. I like it so much I messed with your image a bit in PS. The clouds that that you captures are great. Since you done have "IMAGE EDITING OK" on I won't post it unless you say it's ok.

Mo

Thanks Moe, I keep meaning to change that. Absolutely post up some changes! I uploaded it as a tiff this time on flikr so you should be able to be able to do alot more adjusting than normal.

Toxic Coolaid wrote in post #16674922
Wow, that looks great for only 1.5 hours! Nice job

I have actually been shooting from a green zone, but my scope is an F7 so I have never really been able to take advantage of the nice skies, the telephoto helped alot! Also I just ordered a reducer for the refractor so I should be able to gather alot more data now.

Green pretty great...right? I get to go green ever so often. It's amazing to shoot with no filter or onlt an ir/uv filter on the full modded cameras. Someday I will spend a few days at my sisters in a blue/black zone....ooooooohhhh. Anyway here is what I got when I messed with it. Added some blue to M42 and the man, did a lens correction for coma, noise reduction (probably a bit much), and brought out some cloud detail. You just about have to flip back and forth between yous and mine to see the difference.

Mo

IMAGE LINK: http://flic.kr/p/jTQwo​n

Woa! How did you get all of that color out of M42? The lens correction helped out a ton, photoshop based or something else? I have been thinking about upgrading some stuff lately, either send my 600d to central DS to be cooled, an 8" RC, or a 70-200 f2.8. A better lens would definitely fix the stars but I'm pretty happy with what you were able to do.

I have been spoiled with the green zone, it is a 10 minute drive from my house. Now apparently I have access to a blue zone which is another 19 miles south from my green zone. If you have access to good skies they definitely make a huge difference! The bummer for me is that I graduate in May so I will probably be moving to Atlanta to get a job so I can count on crap skies out there ughh. May have to sell some stuff and go narrow band with an 8300 chip but we'll see. What kind of skies have you been shooting from?

For color I lassoed M42 andthe running man and boosted the blue a bit because I know it should be there. For the coma In PS its Filter--Lens Correction--Custom. You can manipulate the image and even work on vignetting. I used GradX and some Astronomy Tools.

I have a Red zone at home, and you can get some decent images with a CLS and maybe a narrowband or 2 or 3. It takes much longer to get data. Ican get to my green zone in about 40 minutes, the blue zone is about 2 hours away. Free time and clear skies have to line up for me to get to load up and head out. I make it to the green zone 3 or 4 times a year, and I've never been able to go to the blue zone to image.

I really like your macro images. You should shoot a stove element in IR and normal as a good example of what IR will "see"

Words can't describe how awesome this image is. Nice work!

Excellent job Wes in showing wide yet full detail.
Mo's processing is very nice too. Well enhanced. Love everything except Lens correction. That de-barreling has taken the pano wide view distortion effect, then has removed periphery of image that is I would still like to see. Color correction, denoise everything else is just right and may be you could go more with sharpening.

Keep up the wonderful work.

I love wide shots like these. as Samsen said - excellent detail and nice processing.
Great shot!

samsen wrote in post #16682648
Excellent job Wes in showing wide yet full detail.
Mo's processing is very nice too. Well enhanced. Love everything except Lens correction. That de-barreling has taken the pano wide view distortion effect, then has removed periphery of image that is I would still like to see. Color correction, denoise everything else is just right and may be you could go more with sharpening.

Keep up the wonderful work.

Thanks samsen, I wish I could say that I applied lens correction, but I never really got good results. the downfall of a cheap lens like this one is that the edges have coma, the only way to fix this is by stopping down the lens, although I am pretty inclined to get a better lens now. I will miss the Apochromatic functioning of the sigma however, I did a bad job at correcting star color in this image, but the stars look pretty darn good color wise with this lens even when compared to a canon 70-200 L, which I will be replacing it with. thanks for the comments, I hope to keep em coming if these clouds will buzz off.