(February 20, 2012 at 10:18 pm)Cthulhu Dreaming Wrote: Oro -
With all of the postprocessing done in digital astrophotography, you could spend a lifetime tweaking a single image until it's "just right", and you'll probably never quite get there. There will always be something that you know that just isn't quite right - and "fixing" that one thing is likely to "break" others. You of course know this.
The point I'm trying to make is this - your astrophotos are quite beautiful, and certainly show your skill and attention to detail, and from my perspective post as many as you like. Astro imaging is in many ways a very subjective art - deep-sky images will never look the same as they do through the eyepiece due to sensitivity differences in the human eye vs. CCD across the visible spectrum. For me, when it comes to appreciating astro images done for non-scientific purposes, the only criteria I apply is this: Is it beautiful? Even visual artifacts such as diffraction spikes, while technically not "real", are quite beautiful when in-balance with the rest of the image.
By that criteria, you work is an epic win.
Can I ask what instruments you were using? I'm guessing a fast newtonian with a coma corrector. Amirite?
Thanks. The real issue with the earlier ones was that the stars had bloomed during processing, and so were way over exposed. Once I fixed that, the entire image looks a lot better. Here is the list of the equipment used:
Camera:
Hutech Modified Canon T1i with Baader Coma corrector and Baader UV-IR cut filter
Equipment:
200mm f5 Modified Konus Newtonian OTA
Losmandy G-11 GEM with Gemini Go To
80mm f5 Orion Shorty Autoguide scope with Orion Star Shooter autoguider
Losmandy heavy duty tripod.
Conditions:
Transparency - Good
Seeing - poor
Temperature - 20 Degrees F
'The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference between a mermaid and seal. It could not be expressed better.'
-- Samuel "Mark Twain" Clemens
"I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the scriptures, but with experiments, demonstrations, and observations".
- Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
"In short, Meyer has shown that his first disastrous book was not a fluke: he is capable of going into any field in which he has no training or research experience and botching it just as badly as he did molecular biology. As I've written before, if you are a complete amateur and don't understand a subject, don't demonstrate the Dunning-Kruger effect by writing a book about it and proving your ignorance to everyone else! "
- Dr. Donald Prothero
-- Samuel "Mark Twain" Clemens
"I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the scriptures, but with experiments, demonstrations, and observations".
- Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
"In short, Meyer has shown that his first disastrous book was not a fluke: he is capable of going into any field in which he has no training or research experience and botching it just as badly as he did molecular biology. As I've written before, if you are a complete amateur and don't understand a subject, don't demonstrate the Dunning-Kruger effect by writing a book about it and proving your ignorance to everyone else! "
- Dr. Donald Prothero
