December 2012 Astrophotography Contest Winners

[Javio]

Greetings to everybody!

Thank you very much to everyone for participating in the last edition of the 2012 PixInsight Monthly Astrophotography Contest.

I apologize for the big delay the contest is getting related to the poll and results publishing due to the excessive workload.

Once again, we want to encourage everybody to participate in future editions of the monthly contest. According to the points 8 and 10 of the contest rules, when the number of submitted images is less than seven, the monthly contest can have only a winner.

Congratulations to this months' winner! We hope to see everybody in further editions of the PixInsight Monthly Astrophotography Contest.

Unique Prize  — LBN 468, LDN 1148-55-58, RNO 124 in Cepheus by Jcamek.




Clear, dark and steady skies to everybody!

[Alejandro Tombolini]

Congrats Jcamek, good choice of the object. Dark nebulae are difficult to reveal  and you have achieved good details and colors.

Saludos, Alejandro.

[Jan]

Thank you Alejandro! I have to say that it is not that difficult to reveal if you get the data on the nice dark site. This one was taken in Causse Noir, 30 km east from Millau in southern France. This is one of the places where photos comparable to cooled CCD can be achieved with DSLR. But of course, there was a lot of fiddling with histogram and gradients, color saturation etc. Honestly- this result would not be possible without Pixinsight. Recently I have found old data of Rosette nebula, which I gave up (gradients, noise, short exposures), and thanks to Pixinsight I got decent results...

To conclude- dark skies is the primary condition, and the second is good processing tool..