A December Witch - Reprocessed

[Bill Mattil]

All,

Never really got around to liking the image of this that I had taken last year so the past 2 months I've been reprocessing it and trying to make a silk purse out of a sows ear. I don't have a lot of experience with processing widefield data and it requires some different techniques that I am not sure that I posses. Anyway, taken from a very dark location, Tak FSQ106N + STL11K+AP900 and ACP.

4x900s LRGB

http://www.celestial-images.com/Imag...0s-LRGB-1.html

Processed in CCDStack, Assembled in PhotoshopCS and it took an a lot of work to remove the last traces of Rigel - who was attempting to arc-weld the shutter of the camera and burn a hole through the chip. So a lot of gradient removal that was caused by Orion Blow Torch was required. Some sharpening, and this surprised me.... a minimum filter to suppress some of the stars. There were a bunch of them.

Any suggestions to improve this gratefully accepted

Regards

Bill

[Eric Dose]

Very nice indeed! I like it.
Another siren song from Takahashi. No, no, no, then I'd never sleep.

I noticed your notes, just below the image.

• Water cooling?--wow, your chip must have been near -50C given the ambient temp.
• You list the sky transparency as Fair--couldn't tell it from the image. Must have been extremely dark out there. Is this the Fort Griffin north of Abilene?
• I guess I don't understand what 6 nm LRGB filters are. Am I missing something?

Whatever the answers--your image is terrific.

[Bill Mattil]

Hi Eric,

Well, the extra hardware is a general catch all, yes I use water cooling when needed. It wasn't necessary for this image.

There was some thin stuff that lent a bit of murkiness to the sky. It didn't have the "snap" that it sometimes will have.

Lastly, 6nm refers to the Ha Filter <g> Sorry for the confusion, and no, it wasn't used for this image so I should probably fix that.


Thanks for the comments. I'd like to get some more data for this and bring out the details a bit better. Always something else to try and do <lol>

Best Regards

Bill

[Bob Denny]

Bill, that's a super nice image!!!! Thanks for sharing!