Bubble Nebula Ha, HaR,G, B

Imaged with AP 130 @ F/4.5 with SXV H9 CCD. Guided with SBIG STV. Luminance consists of 156 minutes with Hydrogen Alpha 13nm filter (6 minute subs). Red channel is combination of five 6 minute HA exposures and three 10 minute red filter exposures. Green and blue channels each consists of six 10-minute images.

Total exposure time was 336 minutes. HA portion was done in Sept 2006, colors acquired October 2006.

Color exposures were filtered through an IDAS LPS filter to combat light pollution at my SF Bay Area imaging home.

Comments and criticism most welcome. I'm still trying to figure out CCD imaging and appreciate people telling me where I'm going wrong.

Rob Mackie

Attached Image:

Rob,
Looks like you have it figured out pretty good! That's an excellent image. Would love to see it full res, or is this shot binned?
Great going,
Larry

Rob Mackie said:
Comments and criticism most welcome. I'm still trying to figure out CCD imaging and appreciate people telling me where I'm going wrong.

Hi Rob,
I've found that all of the basic advice that I got that seemed counterintuitive to me turned out to be true.
Spend most of your money on the mount? Spend time learning Photoshop? I had initial doubts, but, after all, this was coming from people who had been doing this for awhile. Lo and behold, it turned out to be good advice.
There was another piece of advice that I got that did make sense to me: master making a greyscale image before moving to color. That advice turned out to be truer that I thought.
If I were you, Rob, I would first concentrate on honing your talents on luminance and Ha images. I would ditch the LPS filter and learn how to remove gradients, for instance. I know the temptation to jump right into color is strong, but learning the basics while wrestling with color is almost impossible.

dan kowall

Hello Rob. I am no expert and I am learning just like you, but I do have the same identical equipment as you. AP-130F/6, SXV-H9, STV, G11/Gemini. I think both of the pictures you posted are slightly out of focus, or you had really bad seeing. I haven't shot the bubble in color yet, but you can see my H-Alpha version here: http://www.pbase.com/panotaker/image/63417299 if you click on previous, you can see my color M27.

Im shooting from Austin Texas with lots of light pollution and I don't use the IDAS LPS filter.
Ralph
Ralph

Rob some nice detail in there dude Your color bias is uneven with the red clipped in shadows end and saturation is too high.
Look at you histogram in PS and you'll see that the heavy red in saturation is clipping the shadows .
Adjust these thing with levels in PS using the left hand slider and you should start seeing the image improve.
Drop the saturation in the red channel by as much as It takes to unclip . Still all that said Rob you still have some nice detail in there making the shot look good.