M45 - The Seven Sisters - Pleiades

I often grab a frame or so of M45 at either the beginning or the end of an imaging session. Through the winter its normally in a good position for me to check guiding etc due to the abundance of stars in the area. A mix of frames taken with a 40d and my CCD camera which took a bit of playing with to stack together.

Being a cold wintry day I decided to spend some time sorting through the images I do have and running them through PixInsight. I had to ditch quite a few with trailing or bad sky background but ended up with the best part of 3 hours of decent data. Pixinsight has some great tools for Astro Images but man is it complex to use. I used to use just the Background Calibration and Histogram Tools and then finish off in Photoshop but now pretty much have a workflow from start to finish.

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Coming along nicely.

Very nice Chris but leaning strongly towards Cyan instead of what i know as blue .

Absolutely gorgeous!

Celestron wrote in post #9360053
Very nice Chris but leaning strongly towards Cyan instead of what i know as blue .

I agree with you. Frames were from a mix of CCD and 2 different Canon DSLR's and some included a CLS filter and some did not. Colour balancing is therefore a bit of a mare. Resulting stacked image also had a strong colour cast and a fair gradient.

Will give it another go.

chris.bailey wrote in post #9358025
Pixinsight has some great tools for Astro Images but man is it complex to use. I used to use just the Background Calibration and Histogram Tools and then finish off in Photoshop but now pretty much have a workflow from start to finish.

gorgeous.
please fill me on how you were able to avoid the trails...

chris.bailey wrote in post #9363022
I agree with you. Frames were from a mix of CCD and 2 different Canon DSLR's and some included a CLS filter and some did not. Colour balancing is therefore a bit of a mare. Resulting stacked image also had a strong colour cast and a fair gradient.

Will give it another go.

Hopefully now a little more blue than Cyan.

Bhargav wrote in post #9363056
gorgeous.
please fill me on how you were able to avoid the trails...

A reasonably polar aligned mount with a second scope and camera to guide the main imaging camera.

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Nice image. The CLS is notorious for it's odd color tint. I've yet to get a decent image of the Pleiades, but have read a few articles testing various LP filters on that particular target. Between the CLS, IDAS LPS, and none... You get the best results on Pleiades with none.

Footbag wrote in post #9364060
Nice image. The CLS is notorious for it's odd color tint. I've yet to get a decent image of the Pleiades, but have read a few articles testing various LP filters on that particular target. Between the CLS, IDAS LPS, and none... You get the best results on Pleiades with none.

Agreed but without it I have to severely limit sub duration to keep withing the sky glow limit. Worse of two evils.

chris.bailey wrote in post #9364225
Agreed but without it I have to severely limit sub duration to keep withing the sky glow limit. Worse of two evils.

Understood. I do a lot of shooting from a red zone. Haven't gotten any decent nebulosity since the leaves fell off the trees exposing the streetlights. Probably going to pick up either the IDAS or CLS, but it's a tough choice.

chris.bailey wrote in post #9363155
Hopefully now a little more blue than Cyan.

Alot better now ! More close to what it should be . Check out these images by a friend of mine Jay Ballauer . The second image is almost same as yours .

Lovely image Chris. Love the colours and the dust lanes in this image.

Hard target to do justice with especially with long exposure rates.

Chris, that shot capture a lot of the magic of the Seven Sisters. Very nice accomplishment. And thanks for the shot of your set-up. Well beyond what I've got going.