When I drove a total of 1,200 miles to capture my widefield image of the IFN I thought I had gone too far and told myself I should control myself a bit. So when I calculated the total driving time for this image to be over 1,800 miles (and that's not including the Rho Op area on the left of the image - otherwise, add 800 miles to the 1,800!) I realized I didn't talk to myself clearly enough! :-)

The mosaic above is made out of 52 frames. If we take out the 12 frames from the already mosaic I had done of the Rho Op area, that leaves the 40 frames I captured and processed this month of June alone. Each frame is 3x5 minutes of L and 3x3 minutes each RGB, all bin 2x2.

I captured the data in 9 different nights: 6 outside of the DARC Observatory, 2 during a camping weekend in Plettstone (Bear Valley), and one additional frame catured at the back of the Lick Observatory. All during a period of around 12 days. Um, yes... I do have a DAY job too!!

As I mentioned earlier, the total round trip driving time to these dark sites added up to 1,840 miles driven. Total exposure time for the 40 frames is around 40 hours (48 if we count the Rho Op area) with a time in the field exceeding over 70 hours. The original image, over 18,000 pixels wide, can be provided upon request. It's just too big in size I'd rather not to pay the bandwidth toll (yes I pay for my bandwidth).

People familiar with this area will soon realize the image is upside down, and that's my favored composition. It gives me a stronger feeling as if the nebulosity in the Rho Op area is "escaping" from the Milky Way, although for those who must see it north up, I have a north-is-up 4000x2170 version here (2.1mb).

PROCESSING

A few comments about the processing, in case anyone's interested in the insanity involved in building a 52 frames mosaic and try to get it processed in barely 4 days.

Making the 52 luminance frames to match seamlessly wasn't easy. I had to give up three different methodologies, the first one being an effort of over 10 hours that I finally discarded. Finally, with the luminance more or less registered seamlessly, doing the same with the color made the previous work on the luminance look so easy! Throughout the whole process I used PixInsight, Registar and Photoshop, each of them with their advantages and disadvantages.

Mosaic'ing all red frames, then all green frames then all blue frames over the luminance mosaic didn't work well. You need a 100% perfect result on each channel in order for them to match later, Registar generated way off R, G and B registered frames. PixInsight was much more accurate (also much slower to produce) but still not perfect across the 40 frames (and the moment one channel frame is off, it;s all useless), so I registered and aligned each master R-G-B frame separately, gradient correction (remember, each frame is 5.5x3.5 degrees, which is going to generate much more severe gradients than on smaller FOVs), color balance, etc... 40 times. All this was done with PixInsight which has proven to me its registration process is almost flawless and better than anything else I've tried - including a trial version of CCDStack v2. Making the processed 40 RGB frames to register with the luminance wasn't hard, but still a work of patience, having to do one by one, etc.

Some "purists" may criticize this methodology, as it requires the RGB data to be registered twice: first for each frame, then over to the (luminance) mosaic. All I can say is... Let me know how it goes when you process your own 52 frames mosaic using more "rational" approaches. And I'm not being entirely sarcastic here - I would really like to know how it goes! I did what I could make it work, and out of the different approaches I tried, this is the only one that worked across the entire 40 frames, and it's because of that I can now say that this mosaic has a nearly perfectly seamless luminance - no funky stars around the seam areas, and each tiny little star tat shows color it's because the RGB channel data gave that color to that tiny star and such data matched 100% accurately over the luminance. No other methodology I tried gave me that over the entire field. Maybe I goofeed off, I don't know...

Anyway... But of course, once I had the RGB mosaic nicely aligned, despite it matched perfectly with the luminance, the color from frame to frame was showing quite some differences. How did I process the color data to generate an almost seamless transition? Basically by doing individual adjustments one frame at a time, repeat, repeat, etc. As if it wasn't enough having processed 40 frames individually, I just couldn't see having the color to match seamlessly.. Because most gradients had already been taken care of, color information was uniform, so all adjustments were mainly applied over each entire frame without the need to create individual masks.

In the end, other than 3-4 frames for which the original data was pretty bad and there wasn't much I could do to save them, I managed to get things to match more or less seamlessly.

With all that done, and the L and RGB composites done, the final processing on both was very simple. I know I could improve it if I work on it a bit more, but I'm heading for a trip and I wanted to post what I've got so far, which, with all its defects and so on, it's no small effort. I hope you like it!

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DATE June 6~18th, 2010 PHOTO Exposure: Each frame: L: 3 x 5', RGB: 3x3' each channel Total: 48.4 hours Focal: 385mm, f/3.6Mbr/>All frames bin 2x2

EQUIPMENT Imaging Scope: FSQ 106 EDX w/Reducer Camera: STL11k Guide Camera: StarShoot Autoguider Mount: EM-400

SITE & CONDITIONS DARC Observatory, Plettstone Seeing: Poor Transparency: Good to Very Good SOFTWARE Stacking: DeepSkyStaker Processing: PixInsight & Photoshop

The area of Rho Ophiuchus, Blue Horsehead and Sharpless 1 - The head (and "shoulders") of the scorpion constellation - is without a doubt "the mother of all pretty pictures", and in this 3x4 mosaic I tried to show them all of them in a family portrait.

The image is a 3x4 mosaic with the FSQ+reducer+STL11k captured over 4 nights (plus 800 more miles in my SUV!!).

The interesting thing is that each frame is only 3x5 minutes of luminance, bin 2x2 (see details after this writeup). I am very very surprised to get this quality with so little data. I know binning reduces read noise but I wasn't expecting this...

I would have not done 3x5' and bin 2x2 if it wasn't because when I planned this FOV I didn't calculate it right so I thought I needed a 2x3 mosaic. It was when I was at DARC and ready to start when I realized I screwed up, and after 5 minutes of "what the heck I'm going to do now" I decided to still go for the entire luminance in one night, and do 3x5' 2x2 per frame instead of 3x10' 1x1 as I had originally planned. Either way I think that the short exposure times played on my favor, keeping the stars under control in an area that has more stars than background!!

Eric Zbinden was right next to me that night. He can confirm the madness I was in for the whole night: since I don't use automation software (CCDCommander, etc) I had to switch to a new frame every 15 minutes, and since I also don't do platesolves, I had to make sure each new FOV would match the right area (manually slewing with TheSky6's mosaic tool cannot be trusted 100%). Good thing I didn't need to rotate the camera between frames for this composition!

Even with that, the last two frames were bad, as the sky was already clearing that night, so on Tuesday 18th, I headed out again, and after taking those two frames, since I had time that night to keep going, I started with the color, and after seeing the results with the lum, I went for marginal data as well.

But I knew Tuesday wouldn't be enough, and it wasn't, so I went out again on Wednesday (there's some bright stuff called Moon which is setting rather late these days but still giving 3+ hours of darkness). But late on Wed I was getting tired, and rather than risking falling asleep at the wheel on the way back home, I packed and went home short two RGB frames.

So I went out on Thursday, again. I headed to Montebello (tired of driving so much) but when I got there it was all foggy, so I drove all the way near to Dino Point, which was SO WINDY I had to retreat and I setup not far from the Hwy 152 entrance to Henry Coe but away enough from the road so the cars lights wouldn't be a bother, and there I captured the last two color frames, and went home.

Full disclosure: the areas around Antares and the blue horsehead use color from the two images of those areas I took last year. Likewise, the blue horsehead has luminance from that image as well. It looks better despite I actually lost some resolution. Also, at some point in the processing I "killed" the color in small all stars, so they're all white except the big ones (and the color in the big ones is blown out), so I may go back to this image and be careful with that!

Frame adaptation was very challenging, and the reason I decided to use Photoshop instead of PixInsight for that, as it gave me more freedom to do it, by using layers and manually defined masks, as even after applying background models to each frame to correct gradients, although signal strength was similar, no two frames shared an even background illumination across the overlapping areas, so I would stretch each frame looking for a visual match, and re-stretch using painted masks to correct seam differences. Although I usually try to stay away from painted masks (it's not a religious thing, I simply have more fun using luminance-based masks) in mosaics like this one with somewhat marginal data, I just can't get away with using more strict frame adaptation techniques.

So that's the story. 800 miles and a very unhealthy "schedule" for a pretty picture. I'm seriously considering switching to another hobby, like reading on bed or something :-)

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DATE May 15~21th, 2010 (4 nights) PHOTO 3x4 Mosaic. Exposure: L: 3 x 5', RGB: 3x3' each, for each frame Total: 42 minutes per frame, 8.4 hours total Focal: 385mm, f/3.6

EQUIPMENT Imaging Scope: FSQ 106 EDX w/Reducer Camera: STL11k Guide Camera: StarShoot Autoguider Mount: EM-400

SITE & CONDITIONS DARC Observatory Seeing: Average Transparency: Good SOFTWARE Stacking: DeepSkyStaker Processing: PixInsight & Photoshop

This image covers an area mainly populated by IFN that Steve Mandel named "The Angel Nebula".

The framing is not exactly the one I was looking for - I wanted to have more data on the top area, but I had to crop the FOV as I didn't perfectly frame the red subs (each set was done on different nights, and the lum collected over two nights) since I'm still not doing platesolves and just eyeball the framing. The LGB data does show more data from the top (maybe I should re-take the reds!).

The image is not silk-smooth because keep in mind this is very faint nebulosity and although it may look easy to make it pop, it's still a bit of a challenge. I could reduce the noise a bit more, and some people may feel saturation is a bit too high, but this is how I like it. What I think it's becoming more clear to me is that, despite my color data is not to a point I would consider optimal, and my color balancing is not scientific (I don't use a g2v star or similar techniques), the color of the IFN tends to go more to the brown than to the blue.

So far, the only other image I know from this area is in fact the image from Steve Mandel:

In the image below you can see where this FOV goes, taking as a base the mosaic I did last month (the angel in this case is upside down):

Processing involved mainly DBE, 3-4 unmasked histogram adjustments, one ACDNR pass, one MorphTransform, and of course, color balance, LRGB combine and gradual saturation. The processing did not involve any masked histogram adjustments, curves (except for saturation), DDP, HDR or similar techniques - to better honor relative differences in brightness than DDP, HDR or similar techniques would, for example.

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DATE May 12th, 2010 PHOTO Exposure: L: 20 x 15', RGB: 5x15' each, Total: 8.8 hours Focal: 385mm, f/3.6

EQUIPMENT Imaging Scope:  FSQ 106 EDX w/Reducer Camera:  STL11k Guide Camera:  StarShoot Autoguider Mount:  EM-400

SITE & CONDITIONS DeepSkyRanch, Dinosaur Point, Lake San Antonio, Little Panoche Reservoir, California (4 nights) Seeing: From poor to very good, depending on the night Transparency: From average to excellent, depending on the night Miles Driven: 850 +/- SOFTWARE Stacking: DeepSkyStacker Processing: PixInsight 1.6

I've ended up calling this the 1,200 miles image, because that's the total number of miles I ended up driving in order to capture the data for this image. By the way, that is a record for me! We do crazy things sometimes just to capture a bunch of photons!

The Object

The above wide field image features a large area of the IFN (integrated flux nebula) of the polar spur - probably the largest IFN image captured by an amateur so far. The field of view is approximately 15x9 degrees. The IFN is extremely faint, so much that almost every image taken of this area would either show no IFN at all of at most, a barely perceptible hint of it.

In simple terms, the IFN is dust clouds. However, unlike most known nebulae, they do not reflect, scatter or fluoresce due to the radiation of any individual star or cluster of stars, but do so from the integrated flux of all the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. In other words, the IFN is illuminated by the glow of our own galaxy.

Steve Mandel once said that the IFN was like photographing something through a dirty window, the IFN being the dirt on that window, except that the "dirt" itself is beautiful to behold.

The Challenge

Because the IFN is so faint, capturing it is a challenge, as even under good skies it will sit barely above the noise. This means that once you've captured the data and try to bring the signal from the IFN, you will bring it along with the noise in the image, making it almost impossible to discern between noise and nebulae. This is the main reason most images won't show any or almost any IFN - as astrophotographers deal with the noise - trying to make it dissapear - the IFN will dissapear with it.

For that reason it is important to image this area from as dark skies as you can get. Otherwise, the sky glow will completely bury the signal from the IFN.

How to understand this image

From a scientific point of view, the mind establishes an order regarding what's being seen, because the IFN is the main structure and it appears well defined, but from other perspectives, the image may look simply weird.

Also, one may feel this image has a dirty look, perhaps even artificial, not only because of us looking at the sky through a "dirty window" but also because it would be impossible to preserve a "natural" balance when attempting to reveal the extremely faint IFN structures with so little data and without blowing up the brighter structures. The purpose of this image is to reveal those structures, not to create a natural and silk-smooth "pretty" composition. Beauty in this case is in the eye of the beholder.

Capturing the data

I captured this 2x5 mosaic (10 frames) first three days in a row, on Tuesday April 6th thru Thursday the 8th, and then during one more session on April 16th, 2010, taking advantage of an unusual break in the cloudy weather we've been having this year so far.

The first night I traveled to Dinosaur point to take the data for three frames but I wasn't very happy (too much skyglow), so I decided that the next two days I would travel to Lake San Antonio (about 170 miles from home) which would give me better skies (6.5 ~ 6.6 NELM approx). After all that was done, I went back to Lake San Antonio one third night on April 16th to take the last two frames.

In the end,  I drove over 1120 miles during the four days to acquire the data. I  believe on Friday 9th I was near a coma after the effort (ok not exactly, just BRUTALLY tired). Picture yourself leaving Lake San Antonio on Friday morning at 4am after three restless nights and already 620 miles driven, for another 160 miles drive back home, and around 6:30am as you get near your home, you run into the morning rush hour traffic... We are... a very nut crowd!

Acquisition details

Each frame of the mosaic is only 90 minutes of luminance (6x15') and 27 minutes of RGB color (3x3x3'). I had to limit the exposure to such short times because I knew I would only have just enough clear nights this time around and even with that, I knew I could barely make it. If one thing went wrong, I wouldn't be able to finish it. This also meant that for the most part I would stay put checking the images during the capture at least every hour or so.

Every 2+ hours I'd shift to the next frame. Besides slewing to the next area, this involved taking flat images, rotating the camera,and doing my "manual" plate solving (I don't do plate solves, so the realigmnent - including camera rotation - is done manually, and taking test shots to make sure the camera is well positioned to cover the field for the next frame.

Processing

The small image in this page is downsampled so that it fits well in the page. The large image (the one you see when you click on the image) is downsampled from a larger version. Since the IFN is, as I mentioned earlier, just above the noise, I had to chose between leaving the image at its original size but with the obvious degradation in quality, or take advantage of the benefits of downsampling when "fighting the noise". Even with that you can still see the image is noisy but at this point my goal wasn't to produce a clean image as much as being able to capture all that is going on up there even if that meant producing a less than average quality image from an aesthetic point of view. As with most of my images however, the aesthetics still played a role, and that's why care was put in preserving details, avoiding blown up stars and galaxies, etc.

A big challenge was to join the different frames of the mosaic, where none of them had similar background and signal values, each had its own gradient issues, and even at times the SNR wasn't similar. This forced me to do some very careful but strong adjustments on each frame (using formulas suggested by PixInsight's Juan Conejero), applying synthetic background models, etc.

How to bring out all this faint detail that sits just above the noise, without making the image look like, well, crap? While several conventional techniques were used at different stages, it was probably the multi-scale techniques the ones that helped me bringing out the fainter details while preserving the integrity of the already bright areas. No "selective stretching" was ever done in the image to bring out the significant IFN signal - that is, I did not manually select areas that I later stretched, nor created masks to increase brightness selectively. While luminance-based masks were used at different stages in the processing of the image, none was used to "push" the signal of the IFN over the background. The reason for this is actually quite simple: if I did a "selective stretching" I would be dictating where there is IFN and where there isn't. By avoiding selective stretching, I let the data be the one defining where the IFN is and how much of it.

As for the color, obviously I didn't have enough data to get an accurate rendition of the color in the IFN, and what I've got wasn't deep at all. I knew beforehand I wouldn't have enough time to get deep and detailed color data, so I compromised with at least getting enough color for the stars and the field, hoping that the IFN would at least inherit some color from the background signal, which is most definitely the case here, and that's why the IFN has a brownish hue versus the more expected blueish cast - regardless, the IFN not only scatters blue light but is also fluorescing a broad red spectrum of light known as the Extended Red Emission (ERE), so the brownish hue acquired from my poor color data isn't completely off track.

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DATE April 6-8th and 16th, 2010 PHOTO 2x5 Mosaic (10 frames total) Exposure each frame: L: 6 x 15', RGB: 3x3' each, Total: 19.5 hours Focal: 385mm, f/3.6

EQUIPMENT Imaging Scope: FSQ 106 EDX w/Reducer Camera: STL11k Guide Camera: StarShoot Autoguider Mount: EM-400

SITE & CONDITIONS Lake San Antonio/Dinosaur Point, California Seeing: Average Transparency: Good SOFTWARE Stacking: DeepSkyStaker Processing: PixInsight (80%) & Photoshop (20%)

This image is a 2x1 mosaic, taken over 4 cold winter nights (well, cold for Northern California standards :-)

I started this project with a lot of expectations. I knew I had selected a field that could be very nice if done right, but very very difficult to process for broadband (RGB), due to the overwhelming amount of stars in the field, to the point there's almost more stars than sky! Those days transparency had been average at best, and the seeing hadn't been thrilling either (three of the nights it was really soft). At these short focal lengths, seeing usually doesn't bother me much, but I feel that when so many stars are competing so much for "sky space", a combination of poor seeing and poor transparency are only going to add to the problem.

Multi-scale processing with PixInsight has been key in getting this image to where it is, working at both large and small scale structures to keep the stars from eating up the field and the image. I love the framing though! I think it's the highlight of the image, showing a field that hopefully gives the image its unique appeal. As always, I hope you like it!

This image was selected as NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day on March 19th, 2010

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DATE March 10th, 2010 PHOTO Exposure for each mosaic frame: L: 10 x 10', RGB: 5x5' each Total: 5.8 hours Focal: 385mm, f/3.6

EQUIPMENT Imaging Scope: FSQ 106 EDX w/Reducer Camera: STL11k Guide Camera: StarShoot Autoguider Imaging Scope: EM-400

SITE & CONDITIONS Dinosaur Point and DeepSkyRanch, California Seeing: Poor Transparency: Average SOFTWARE Stacking: DeepSkyStaker Processing: PixInsight & Photoshop

The data for this image is NOT all mine, but a collaborative effort between three friends: Al Howard, Eric Zbinden, and me. I did the processing of the data for the version you see here.

Eric, Al and I often meet at dark sites to do imaging, so we had this fun idea of all of us targeting the same object, but each of us using different filters.

Eric took the Ha data. Al took the luminance, and I took the RGB (color).

To make things more fun, each of us was shooting with a different telescope and a different camera. Al used a QSI583 camera on a NP101is scope, Eric used a FLI16003 on an AP155, and I used my STL11k with the FSQ106.

While the resolutions from each of our scopes/cameras aren't brutally far apart, they're definitely not close. Add to that the nights we captured the data were rather bad - the first night none of us could get more than one hour because fog rolled in, then on the other nights, transparency was really bad... Yet I think the image came out rather ok.

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DATE February 13th, 2010 PHOTO Exposure: L: 24 x 10', RGB: 6x10' each, Ha: 7 x 30' Total: 10.5 hours Focal: Read description

EQUIPMENT Imaging Scope: Read description Camera: Read description

SITE & CONDITIONS Bonny Doon and Dinosaur Point, California Seeing: Poor Transparency: Average to poor SOFTWARE Stacking: DeepSkyStaker Processing: PixInsight & Photoshop

This project started as a H-Alpha 2x2 mosaic of the Rosette and Cone nebulas in Monoceros. The top-left pane was taken during full Moon (23 degrees away from this field).

You can see the H-Alpha image only here.

After having the Ha, I was hoping to gather LRGB to make a color image, however I could only squeeze one night for RGB before bad weather arrived, and on that night, I only had about 3 hours before the Moon would show up that night, so the only way I thought I could gather some color that I could use was by using my Canon 40D and a camera lens, and that's how I've got the color (18x10'). Not enough time to get separate RGBs and luminance, much less for a 2x2 mosaic.

Since the color data was so bad compared to the Ha, rather than combining the Ha with the RGB and getting a luminance out of that, I used the Ha as luminance - something I wouldn't recommend - then did some needed heavy surgical work to the RGB image and added it over the Ha-made-luminance, which not only created the famous salmon salad effect but also generated undesirable color blotch and other artifacts. Although I do have a version where I tried to transform the "salmon color" into the more accurate reddish color of strong Ha areas, I felt the image suffered more overall, creating even greenish-looking stars! For that reason I decided to make the version you see above - the salmon color image - the "official" image for this project. You can see the "cherry red" image here.

This image was selected as NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day on February 14th, 2010.

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DATE December 1st, 2009 PHOTO Exposure: Ha: 18 x 20', RGB: 20x10' Focal: 385mm, f/3.6

EQUIPMENT Imaging Scope: FSQ 106 EDX w/Reducer Camera: STL11k Guide Camera: StarShoot Autoguider Imaging Scope: EM-400

SITE & CONDITIONS Home, Sunnyvale, California Seeing: Poor Transparency: Average SOFTWARE Stacking: DeepSkyStaker Processing: PixInsight & Photoshop

It took me a couple of tries to get the combination of the H-Alpha image with the LRGB but in the end I'm pleased with the results. Barnard's loop is impressive, and I think in this image I framed its most attractive area.

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DATE November 24th, 2009 PHOTO Exposure: L: 9 x 5', RGB: 6x5' each, Ha: 5 x 20' Total: 3.9 hours Focal: 385mm, f/3.6

EQUIPMENT Imaging Scope: FSQ 106 EDX w/Reducer Camera: STL11k Guide Camera: StarShoot Autoguider Imaging Scope: EM-400

SITE & CONDITIONS H-Alpha data: Henry Coe State Park, California LRGB data: Henry Coe State Park, California Seeing: Average Transparency: Good SOFTWARE Stacking: DeepSkyStaker Processing: PixInsight & Photoshop

This image is a widefield around the Flaming Star Nebula in the constellation Auriga, that also includes other objects such as the Tadpoles, the M38 cluster (top-left of the image), etc.

I started taking 20x10' of L and 5x5' (bin 2x2) of each RGB. This was last Saturday from the DARC Observatory.

When I started processing it, and as I was trying to pull out the fainter nebulosity, the stars started to dominate the field. I simply couldn't contain them no matter what I did. So on Monday I decided to take a short trip to Montebello and captured 6x20' of H-Alfa, to see if then, with more signal in the nebulosity and smaller stars I could better manage the image.

I added 20% of the processed luminance to the also processed Ha, but I didn't add any Ha to the color - I used only the color information from the RGBs. The Ha left the better SNR areas a bit soft but I was much more pleased with the results.

The color was originally a bit unconvincing, so I first did a color calibration by selecting an area mainly packed with white-looking stars and balance the whole image assuming the average color of the stars in that selecion was indeed white. After that I neutralized the background taking one small area as a reference.

What I realized however is that I am no longer going to take RGBs binning 2x2, unless I'm dealing with an emergency - such as not enough time and evaluating that I will definitely get better SNR if I bin 2x2. The reason is what others have mentioned and that I could really notice this time. Basically after adding the color I could notice a very obvious ringing around many stars, ringing that wasn't nearly as obvious by looking only at the luminance.

It's a very interesting field, packed with interesting objects not often seen all in the same image. I hope you like it!

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DATE November 21st, 2009 PHOTO Exposure: L: 20 x 10', RGB: 5x5' each, Ha: 6 x 20' Total: 6.6 hours Focal: 385mm, f/3.6

EQUIPMENT Imaging Scope: FSQ 106 EDX w/Reducer Camera: STL11k Guide Camera: StarShoot Autoguider Imaging Scope: EM-400

SITE & CONDITIONS DARC Observatory    Seeing: Very Good    Transparency: Good Montebello OSP    Seeing: Very Good    Transparency: Average SOFTWARE Stacking: DeepSkyStaker Processing: PixInsight & Photoshop

Here's my "November project" with the FSQ/STL11k...

In this image I first tried to put into practice a method to pull the dust out that I had been thinking these past few days, and I didn't end up too thrilled about the results. It induced some "blur/denoise-like" effects early in the processing, and it also fabricated bloated star halos in the mid-sized stars (Rigel was put where it belongs with a quick HDRWT).

So after the fact I went back and did some reprocessing from scratch treating large and small scale structures separately, then merged the results to the previous image. This helped me reduce some of the halos (I did't bother with the big ones because those are "optical presents" not the effect of bad processing), keep the stars under control, enhance the witch head a bit, etc. but didn't remove the denoise/blur effect on the background.

I still think the initial processing thingy may work, I just need to play with it a bit more and be more careful next time... Nevermind the halo aroud Rigel is purple, although that's how it came out.

The image is in fact a 2 pane mosaic with data from 3 frames, each taken from a different site, with a total exposure of almost 12 hours.

This image was selected as NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day on December 29th, 2009.

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DATE November 16th, 2009 PHOTO Exposure:    First frame: L: 10 x 15', RGB: 6x5' each,    Second frame: L: 13 x 15', RGB: 7x5' each,    Third frame: L: 10 x 10', RGB: 5x5' each, Total: 11.9 hours Focal: 385mm, f/3.6

EQUIPMENT Imaging Scope:  FSQ 106 EDX w/Reducer Camera:  STL11k Guide Camera:  StarShoot Autoguider Imaging Scope:  EM-400

SITE & CONDITIONS First frame: DARC Observatory, California Second frame: Dinosaur Point, California Third frame: Henry Coe State Park, California Seeing: Good to Excellent Transparency: Very Good SOFTWARE Stacking: DeepSkyStaker Processing: Registar (to align the mosaic), PixInsight & Photoshop