New Forum - First Light

Hello all. I finally got a chance to go to a dark sky site and try out the new setup (G-11, Sky90, ST2000XM). I decided to start with an easy target..... M42. I had a little trouble with the auto guiding, so the stars are not perfect, but overall I am pretty pleased with the results. This is an RGB image, with 60 seconds of data for each color. I combined it in Maxim at proportions: Red-1.2, Green-0.9, Blue-1.1, then processed in Photoshop. What do you think? I took some shorter exposures and will try to add them later to fill in the overexposed areas.
Cheers,
Tyler

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This is a great image, Tyler, especially from just 60 seconds for each color. You can't beat dark skies. The extended nebulosity near the bottom of the the frame and the Running Man nebula are showing up.

The stars look good to me!

Nice job - Cal

Wonderful colors & detail Tyler, specially considering how short your exposures were... there's no doubt that DARK SKIES make a BIG difference!


Thanks! and keep it up!

Very Nice Tyler! I look forward to seeing the shorter exposures added in.
Don Spencer

Hello again. I just found a new way to process the images to prevent washing out the brighter areas. This is the same data as the previous posting, but it was processed using a different stretch function. It really brought out more detail, especially in the brighter areas. I think it is a big improvement. Any thoughts or opinions?
Cheers,
Tyler

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