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Well, they can't all be APODs. I had to resort to just 120" of exposure for these subs due to my autoguider camera getting knocked out of focus, and even at ISO 1600 there just weren't enough photons to get smooth nebulosity. Live and learn, right? 15 x 120", (over-)processed in Photoshop.

You still got a lot of nebulosity despite the noise. But when I shot the eastern arc of the Veil recently with my stock K-3II (still working on the processing and it's only 10 minutes total integration time at f/5!) I got a greenish-blue (teal) hue in addition to the magenta/red hues that I see here. Surely the K-5IIs and the K-3II can't be all that different in color response? In fact, I would have assumed they would be very close.

Oh, I'm sure it's my processing. You would not believe how hard I had to haul on those sliders to get this stuff visible at all! At those curve slopes, we're pretty much in the Realm of Fevered Imagination, generating pixels from stray cosmic rays and butterfly farts two counties over.

If I balanced the colors so that the background wasn't so red, I lost a lot of the nebulosity too.

I am really looking forward to your images!

Well, what do you know, the butterflies did leave me a little blue to work with. I guess I just gave up too soon!

nice field of view! looks good.

Here's an early peek. I added a few more subs so it's about 12 minutes of data. I have been experimenting with RawTherapee using Roger Clark's settings (Astrophotography with RawTherapee, Clarkvision.com) followed by his rnc-color-stretch program (rnc-color-stretch Astro Image Stretching, Clarkvision.com). There is a lot going wrong here (background gradients, over-correction of vignetting, etc.) and I have to back it up and start over. But the combination of those two programs has reduced noise and brought out the color extremely effectively. This is just a low-resolution jpeg straight out of rnc-color-stretch that I was using as a test run (much quicker to try things than using the full size image).

Hmmm... you've piqued my interest. I think I've got most of my kinds worked out when it comes to capture but I'm really just starting to develop my processing skills. I'll check out rnc-color-stretch. thanks