Sometimes, when I'm at a dark site, working on any given project, I run into "dead" times. Moments when there's no point in spending time shooting at my chosen targets. Perhaps because they're already too low in the sky, maybe because they aren't high enough.
When these moments are long enough, an hour, maybe more, I often improvise, and do a quick capture of "something" I haven't even thought of it... Many times these shots don't go anywhere. But sometimes, they marvel me.
This image is one of such. During one of the New Moon nights of September 2010, when I was done for the night working on a project, I improvised just a few shots to the Hyades, in Taurus, being this an area it has always interested me visually, despite it's not a usual astrophoto target.
The image bears very little data for astrophotography standards. All four filters gathered light for less than one hour combined. It's so little data because as I said, it was just something improvised to "kill" time...
So just about 1 hour of data, and just a bit longer spent on processing the image, rendered however what I feel is a refreshing view of one of the areas of the sky that, despite being quite visible, even to the unaided eye, at moderately dark sites, it has received little to no attention from the amateur astrophotography community.
Because this was the last unprocessed data I had at the time, when I calibrated and stacked the images at home, at first I was simply getting the image "done", but the moment I saw a hint of galactic cirrus in it (and as you may guess I always look for any faint signal the image may offer), I became interested! Considering the little time spend, I'm actually very happy the way it turned out.
The composition didn't aim for many goals either. I wanted to place the star Aldebaran at a location in the field of view that would support and balance the image. Not in the middle, but somewhere where it would give enough weight so as to become the "holding point". From my perspective I believe I achieved that simple goal.
This was the first image I processed only with PixInsight 1.61, from the very first stages of calibration, registration and integration.
As for the galactic cirrus (the faint background dust clouds), I have compared the field with its corresponding area from the IRAS survey and the background clouds match quite well, in some cases being virtually identical structures, so I have no doubt the signal is good. The only area that doesn't match is around Aldebaran: in the IRAS data you can see structures around it, but in my image there's just brightness and you cannot see any structures. Here's a screen shot of that area as captured in the IRAS survey, after placing dots over the location of the main stars, to better compare both images:
