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

Sunday, February 12, 2012

California Nebula Under Relatively Dark Skies

I went and visited the site where I had taken the Pleiades which I wrote up in an earlier post on Feb 9, except this time I imaged NGC1499 (The California Nebula).  I had imaged this nebula before from home on a couple of occasions.  What a difference it makes when photographing this stuff from a clear sky!  I took a set of 18- 2 minute subs at iso 800 and tried a couple of different processing techniques to try to get the most detail and produce as pleasing an image as I could.

These are, by far the best I've been able to take so far.  I only wish I had more time to take more frames before the clouds started rolling in.

This is the first image.  This was shot using the Canon T3 using about 200mm of a 300mm zoom lens.  I had tried a couple of different ways of processing this image.  I'm having about as much trouble processing as I am acquiring the images.

Here I brightened the image a little.  I'm not certain what is causing the haze in the  upper part of the image.  I'm kind of leaning towards lens vignetting.  These were cropped, and the nebula was in the lower 1/3 of the frames.  The site was not totally dark, but much darker than my home location.

This one I think is my favorite image.  I did some work on the brighter stars (perhaps too much), but I like the contrast on this one the best.

I need to do some reading on post processing.  I'm also thinking that once I'm able to shoot through a telescope (which will be very soon), I'll get far better images.




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