Hello. Looks like M42 is the big winner today! This is made up of some old and new information to try and tone down the core area . I am not much in the way of experience when it comes to color especially using 4 different filter combinations. The one thing I had in my favor was that all filters are made by Astrodon so the filters are easy to focuse. Putting the many layers together is a different story. I am open for improvement comments so if you see something I can do PLEASE let me know. The one big difference in this and the last color image is the way all were combined. The last was a median and this is an add which didn't get rid of the sat. trails across the center. Smoothness was difficult and not perfect. I also reduced the pix to 1K wide. Hope you like it.
Mike H

Nice shot Mike - I like the "Smokey" dust/gas area around the outer fringes. Is that due to the increased detail provided by the H-Alpha filter?
Thanks for posting.
Mike

Thanks. It looked to me that the clear, lum, filter actually had a lot of the fainter detail in that area but the Ha adds a lot. I would like to have more of the varied filters like Pablo but for that I would need a new filter wheel and that is just more expence. Boy sometimes it just never ends with the "grass is greener" I fall into. I'm thinking about selling my ST2000xm which I used for this image and moving to the 11000 chip. 35mm size with anti-blooming.
Mike

Hi Mike,
This is a great picture. I thought about some ideas to work in Photoshop.
One is to add the Halpha to the red channel (Maybe just 30-40% opacity).
Also to get smaller stars I would use Ha as the luminance layer and dust/speckle & gaussian blur the color one. That way the stars get fuzzy in the color layer.
Also to get less pastel color I usually change the mode to lab color (Only the color layer) then in the channels I put the crisp Ha picture as the lightness channel.

Let me post in another thread the layers as the look before combining in lab colors mode.

Best,
Pablo

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Pablo - Fayetteville, AR

The Ha was added in PS3. This is the biggest problem for me. Blending the small star of the Ha with the color layer and or the Clear/lum layer. There must be a trick that the regulars of deep sky use that I don't know about. Your class would help me here I am sure.
Mike

Recently I bought a TV60is. Have wanted wider FOV and wasn't pleased with my DSLR and didn't have 8 or 9K for a 35mm sized ccd chip. Last night I mounted the 60is on top of the TV127is which I used for a guide scope and I was really pleased. This image is a combination of 5x2min exposures with the ST10xmei. Flats supplied and the entire image was reduced from 2150pix to 1650 wide. No other processing was done which shows the kind of work that is put into image processing. Lots of faint outer gas was easly picked up and sometime I will gather a few hours of info for a color. Shows the different FOV from the TV127is at 530 and a ST2000xm ccd compaired to the TV60is using the ST10xmei.
Thanks, Mike H

Is that a comet just to the left of the "Runnung Man"??

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nSpace01