Surprisingly the Newcastle weather cooperated for the first half of last night then the wind picked up sinificantly aaand the seeing went AWOL too not to menton the moon rose...

Never the less I managed to get a small amount of data before the conditions put and end to serious imaging . I did do another 60min of Lum after the change of conditions but it was all very soft and I discarded it ....

A difficult region to process, particularly with such little data and I had two stars just out of field that shone beautiful search lights from out side the frame right towards the central reflection nebula. I left them in as I think they look rather spectacular actually..? and becasue I couldn't remove them properly anyway.

Because I had so little data there is a little more noise than I'd like in some of the dusty areas after pushing the data in order to reveal it all and I didn't use any noise reduction in order to preserve the fine structures, particularly around the reflection nebula area. I did do several versions using noise reduction and layer blending etc but in the end I went for the fine detail over the smoothness and decided that becasue it was dust the slight grainyness kinda fits anyhoo..? The grainy ness has been accentuated by jpeg compression of course, the original fits/Tiffs look a bit smoother.

Small size image for whole image on the screen:

http://www.pbase.com/strongmanmike20...83370896/large

Large size for panning

http://www.pbase.com/strongmanmike20...70896/original

Hope you enjoy it

The other thing I did different for this image was use flats for the first time in my life. I recently acquired a great flat field device from AstroHandy Acccessories called the LightRing and it works a charm see:

http://www.pbase.com/strongmanmike20...andy_lightring

After the conditions went to crap I took the opportunity with the scope already setup to do flats and flat darks for every filter LHaRG&B and I have them stored for possible future use.

Mike