Win a Pentax Limited Lens: Raffle Now Live!

I could only get H-alpha data from the Eagle Nebula with the ASI1600mmpro up to now. Therefore I used an older K3ii image for the color and the stars. This is what came out:



This was the K3ii image from last summer (I had posted a cropped version):



And this is the actual Ha image - where I pulled a lot of dark background stuff into the light:



ASI1600mmp, 48 x 300 s with a Baader 7nm Ha-filter.

Looks like marble stone, doesn't it?

Cheers
Pete

P.S I wonder why I can post this and was not able to get the text posted in fewayn's last thread!!

Once again Peter: amazing result!
Are you still able to do some astrophotography or is the night sky too bright?

whoa! You continue to blow us away! Nice to see the Pentax is still contributing.

I've really got to start trying to do that. Great image, Pete.

Good morning Kent,

yes I do some imaging and it works quite good though the time is short and the nights are bright. I could get nice RGB data from the Owl Nebula (M97) with dozens of tiny background galleries end of may and bicolor narrowbin images of the Crescent Nebula with RGB stars in Moonlight at the begining of June - you can find them here pete_xl | Flickr if you like. As long as the nights are so bright I will mostlay shoot Ha and OIII data and combine them using short RGB sequences for the stars. In these days I really profit from the pier in the little balcony obseratory that lets me try without effort any time the conditions seem Ok.

Pete

Yeah, I have used my K3ii data with good success in combination with ASI data in the past. Now I started to prepare my setup to use my Pentax lenses adapted to the ZWO filter wheel and cameras for astroimages with wide fov. And I also want to use this combination for something like "lucky imaging" from the tripod when I am in absent places.

As I wrote in my PM the use of freeware Starnet++ (PC + MAC)is very helpful for images like this. I suggest for erveryone of you to invest 2 hours and try it out. In narrowband images it removes 99.9% of the stars as if they had never been there. In RGB images with blown up stars the left over halos of the big stars can easily be retouched in Photoshop. At the end of the processing the stars are blended in again with a copy of the original image in "lighten" layer mode. If somebody encounters problems I'd be glad to give some support.

Here an example:





You can see a residual blotch at 11 o'clock and two at 7 o'clock and some few stars that were left. The residuals come from halos that the Baader Ha filter produces with bright stars. The rest of the stars were killed by the "neuronal network" algorythms of starnet++.