The Pleiades and surrounding dust

Comment

Comment by Charles Dunlop on March 25, 2013 at 9:33pm

love this one. The dust clouds add to the shot.

Comment by Steve Coates on January 18, 2013 at 12:09pm

Holy cow! Fantastic image! Well done!!!!

Comment by Josh Lake on January 18, 2013 at 4:22am

There's a bit of a learning curve, but it's worth it IMO. I'm here to help!

Comment by Trevor Woodrow on January 17, 2013 at 6:17pm

Saw all the traffic on the main page and had to come over to see what all the hub-bub was about....and now I see why...fantastic work here, I have never seen the surrounding dust captured like this. Well done!

Comment by Josh Lake on January 17, 2013 at 5:36pm

Fred, are using 1.7 or 1.8? The 1.8 update is new and still a little wonky, but 1.7 is solid as a rock. They should be able to help on the PI forums for sure (Juan, the lead developer, is on there all the time). I've never heard of a file format breaking the program, so I'd suspect a version issue. I'm still processing in 1.7 for now, waiting for the update to stabilize.

Comment by Josh Lake on January 17, 2013 at 2:26pm

TIFs will work fine too, but there is a great added incentive to working with FITS: 32-bit pixel depth. I keep and save my data as 32 bit floating point FITS through the whole process until the export at the end. If I start with TIFs, I save intermediate steps as FITS. And sure, FITS can be color!

Comment by Russ Ruggles on January 17, 2013 at 11:42am

Thanks Josh!!

Comment by Josh Lake on January 17, 2013 at 11:26am

Russ, here's the processing video for the one I did before this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXpBXO82Q80&list=UU35JHxxroGRGZ7...

Fred, I really love PixInsight, it's revolutionized the way I process over the last 2 years. I'd be happy to help or even take a look at your data. I think you're right, M45 doesn't carry a lot of H-alpha, so I'd recommend just going deep with Luminance as much as possible to bring out the dust.

All of my previous M45 attempts look similar to your pic, but I was able to do some masked stretches that really brought out the dust. The exposure times were not all that high, actually, just 240 seconds for the Luminance and 180 seconds for the color data.

As far as Background Extraction goes, it doesn't have to be tedious at all, you can have it generate the samples. In fact, for simple fields, I just use Automatic Background Extraction and the results are great. For fields like this, I try a trick -- I get a nice dusty shot from APOD or somewhere else, place the points based on that pic, and then transfer the model to my own pic. It works well!

Comment by Russ Ruggles on January 17, 2013 at 9:38am

More detail would be very helpful for me..... a new PI user.
Actually, a video tut wouldn't be out of the question :)

Comment by Josh Lake on January 17, 2013 at 9:13am

Thanks! It's a Takahashi FSQ-106 + SBIG STL-11000 with Astrodon filters. No H-alpha in this one, just pure LRGB.

I credit the depth of the image to the clear skies, but more importantly, to some good subtle tweaking in PixInsight. Some masked stretchs and a lot of care with the background extraction model. I can give you more detail if you're interested.