clear sky chart

Job 9:9

Job 9:9-10
9 He is the Maker of the Bear and Orion,
the Pleiades and the constellations of the south.
10 He performs wonders that cannot be fathomed,
miracles that cannot be counted.
NIV

Saturday, January 7, 2012

Reprocessed Orion Nebula

I was playing with photoshop most of the day today, and I managed to reprocess the Orion Nebula today.  This is the new image, which I like better than the one I posted a couple days ago...


I think I'm starting to get the hang of this.  I used some Gaussian blur to get rid of some noise on the dim edges of the nebula, and the HDR functions in photoshop does some nice work on the colors.  I do notice some chromatic aberration occurring with this low end camera lens.

I also photographed the area around Alintak, and was able to capture the Flame Nebula, and I did capture the horsehead.  Neither came out well, but I do know now that its possible with the unmodified camera.  Trouble is, processing that image is proving to be rather difficult, being I didnt get enough good frames to make them bright enough, so theyre quite noisy.  I only was able to use 6 - 90 second frames, as it was getting breezy out, and many of the frames I had taken were blurry.



Actually, this didnt come out too bad, considering I used only 6 frames.  if you look closely, you can see a hint of the Horsehead below the bright star.  The red nebulosity is beginning to show up, but it is quite dim.  Remember also, this was taken durring a gibbous moon.  There isnt any detail whatsoever in the horsehead, as the area is about 50% noise.  Longer imaging time should produce an image.  This is a smaller nebula than I expected also, so I may not be able to get a good image of this until I figure out how I'm going to achieve focus with the Canon on the telescope.  I will probably have to cut the tube and move the mirror forward.


2 comments:

Howard said...

Do you stop down the camera lens? That might help clean up some of that chromatic aberration, at the cost of longer exposures. I picked up a used Rebel XT I plan to use on the telescope, once I pry that pesky IR cut filter out of it.

Mike H - KD0AR said...

No... I havent, but that is a good idea to try.

I'm running my camera unmodified. I'm still able to get emission nebulae. I was able to capture the Horsehead on 1/10, but it was real low and washed out be city lights, then when it got high enough, the moon got it. It is definately there though. It does a nice job on the Flame nebula, however....

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