Milky Way wide field w/200mm lens

[chris_todd]

Well, this is my second image processed in PI, and thanks to the BatchPrepocessing script, my first image completely processed in PI.

I'm relatively happy with this shot, but the colors just don't seem to pop the way they do in Yuri's excellent shot of the Cat Paw.  Obviously, I still have a lot to learn about how to use PI to extract and enhance every last bit of data in the image.

Details:
Unmodified Canon T2i on an Astrotrac ((unguided)) with Canon 200mm f/2.8L lens @f/4.  Sixteen 5 minute subs w/darks, flats, bias.  Taken from the Texas Star Party on April 18th, 2012, between roughly 5 and 6 am, when the ambient temp was about 35* F (2* C).  It gets chilly in the West Texas mountains!



I also created an annotated version using the new script, which is very cool:

[georg.viehoever]

Nice! Try the ColorSaturation tool for more color.

[chris_todd]

Thanks for the suggestion, Georg.  I had previously tried the curves tool, but I couldn't get it to tweak M16/17 without significantly changing the star fields.  Playing with the ColorSaturation tool was fun, though.  Let me know what you think of this result:

[astropixel]

Very nice Chris. Love the annotation!

[Geoff]

Hi Chris
The second one is a definite improvement on a very nice image.  I think that you have probably extracted most of the colour available to an unmodified DSLR.  I did one of M17 with an unmodified DSLR some years back and the colours were very similar to yours.
Geoff