This image is a stack of 22 30sec. frames taken on the 8th of January 2011 using my Canon EOS550D and Skywatcher 200P, unguided. It was quite a windy evening so I had to discard about 30-40 shots due to camera shake! The RAW files from the camera were enhanced slightly and converted to 16bit TIFFs using the Canon supplied software - Digital Photo Professional. From here they were stacked using DeepSkyStacker, together with Darks and Flats and then finished off using the GIMP. I used this convoluted method because DeepSkyStacker doesn't seem to work too well with the RAW images from my camera (maybe I'm doing something wrong?) but it works very nicely with TIFFs.The center of the nebula is a bit over-exposed but all in all, quite a pleasing result....
2 comments:
Nice one Tim. Very nice indeed.
Can you use DDP in GIMP? If so it should help reduce the burnout. Could you let me have a copy of the stacked and calibrated tif file please, so I can have a play in Photoshop?
Thanks Brian.
What's DDP?
The stacked TIFF is about 100M, what's the best way to get this over to you? It's obviously too big to e-mail!
Do you remember those rig shaped variations I was getting in the background that we thought were due to the home-made light box I'm using (you can see them in the NGC7331 image)? Well it turns out that they are caused by stacking JPEGs using DeepSkyStacker, hence the reason I started experimenting with TIFFs.
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