Hello Trevor, another 'keeper', it would look envious on anyone's wall, and all your own work - short of making the equipment yourself.
Your choice of the Hubble palette means that we can compare with others, and the differences are more with individual choice than quality. You have captured subtle detail and the stars are small and round.
Similar images show more contrast and colour but whilst that's okay/popular for some your version is more subtle and realistic which I prefer.
Of note, this object is the same distance and direction as the Double Cluster, NGC884 and 869; both 7,500 lightyears and only about 3º apart, so both are close to each other in the Perseus Arm, further out from us. I wonder what each would look like from each other. I don’t think there is anything near us that can pin down our address...
Also of note, the size that stars in Melotte 15 that can grow (50 solar masses is very high) depends, amongst other things, the purity of the hydrogen gas they contract from; the less of anything other than hydrogen and helium the more massive they get, because ... that's another story for another time.
As stars shine across the whole spectrum but the gas only in parts, you used three lots of filters. Ha, Oiii, Sii for the cloud, L (no filter) for the stars, and R G B in between for good measure. I'm sure this isn’t quite right; as Tim asks please let us know.
The image straight out of the camera will be very dark. There's no easy way of having it brighter in the camera. You could expose for an hour instead of 5 minutes, but then light pollution would creep in, and everything else would make it worse. As the object gets close to the horizon the atmosphere degrades the image, and you'd only be able to do a few exposures all night. You wouldn't get the benefit of reduced noise because of fewer exposures, and the rest. Brightening the image is part of processing, and requires skill, perhaps more than any other part of processing, which requires knowledge.
For all the work and expense that goes into producing Hubble Space Telescope images, they have a better starting point than us.
Thanks for sharing.
William
On Mon, 15 Aug 2022 at 14:16, Kevin Phillips <
thewels...@live.com> wrote:
What a beautiful image. Great colors. A lot of work went into this image.
Kevin
On Wed, 10 Aug 2022 at 08:45, Tim Coskun <
tcos...@gmail.com> wrote:
That's a super image Trev - very well done - you should be proud of it. I particularly like the colour hue. Did you use the LRGB channels just for the stars or did you combine them into the nebula and background narrowband data also?
Cheers Tim C
On Tue, 9 Aug 2022 at 21:49, John Mills <
ejm...@millseyspages.com> wrote:
Hi Trevor,
That´s a great looking image. Well done. Must have taken taken you ages to process all that data. Not only narrow band but LRGB also. Quite an achievement!
ATB John M
On Tue, 9 Aug 2022 at 19:45, 'JR' via croydonastro <
croydo...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
You put a huge effort into that Trevor and it's paid off big time all ways round, with the composition, the data acquisition, and the processing . An amazing image. Well done
James
On Tue, 9 Aug 2022 at 18:30, paul stenning <
paulste...@gmail.com> wrote:
I very much like images of the heart nebula and would definitely like to get much closer to the central pillars,Well done it is a very good image.