M20, M8 y NGC6559

[jmtanous]

Hi,


Hi,

I managed to image the well known Sagittarius Triplet from a rural location. The framing is not very good cause I didn't plan the mosaic, so the framing was created on the fly... It is a shame cause the night was very good.

Anyway, this are the image details:


Picture details:
Camera
Orion Starshoot pro V2

Telescope
Takahashi Epsilon 160

Mount
Orion Atlas

Exposure
2 Frame mosaic
Panel 1: 58 x 2 minutes (~2h)
Panel 2: 34 x 2 minutes (~1h)

Total exposure time: ~3h

Processing
Acquired MaximDl (using dithering).
Stacked, Stretched, Cropped, Saturated and resampled with Pixinsight

SQM: 21

The processing was like this:

-- Pre processing with bias and flats
-- Debayer
-- Align
-- Combine (windorize sigma clipping default values)
-- Stitch the 2 panels with (StarAligment)
-- Color calibration
-- SCNR 100% green channel
-- Noise reduction using Multiscale median transform + L mask
-- Mask stretch
-- Histogram Transform
-- HDRMultiscaletransform Layer 6, 1 iteration
-- Curves transform to enhance contrast
-- Color Saturation to desaturate the image.. Yeap, the image was very colorful so I muted the pinks a little
-- Star Reduction on very small stars
-- Resample to 70%
-- Save to jpeg

More details here:

http://mtanous.mine.nu/iweb/astropix/M20_M8_NGC6559.html



Cheers,

Jose

[nmontec]

An excellent mosaic,Jose. May I say you could add a bit more light to the inner part of M8?to my taste of course.
Clear skies
Nicola

[jmtanous]

Nicola,

Thanks for commenting on my image.

I know you from Cloudynights... You have some nice images, with the FSQ85, and now you jumped to a Vixen VISAC right? Cool...

It is very hard to balance this kind od shoots. For instance if you see the image at native resolution, it make sense to keep the M8 core not very bright (low dynamic range) so you can see more details, however if you see the image as a complete scene is is more pleasing to see the core brighter, cause at low resolution you won't see the core details anyway. I decided to do it this way to bring out the trifid details.

Cheers,

Jose