Thursday, January 10, 2013

Pleiades in Deep Sky Stacker, 205 subs at 1.3 sec each

Ok, so after my moderate success with the Orion Nebula using short exposures stacked in DSS, I decided to try The Pleiades for my next target. I was hoping for something like this, but ended up with this:

Pleiades with 300mm lens
205 subs (f/5.6, ISO 1600, 300mm, 1.3 sec), 30 darks, and 30 flats bias stacked in DSS

So I didn't get much (if any) nebulosity out of the image, but at least my stars are round! I used a shorter-than-necessary exposure time to make sure I didn't get trails, which maybe sabotaged my ability to capture any faint wispy gas couds.

This stack is a total exposure time of 4 minutes and some change. It's possible that with a larger stack I could develop some wispyness in the area, but for now I'm pleased with a neat star cluster.

I tried everything I could to bring out the nebulosity in processing but I think it comes down to longer exposure time.

hdr toning photoshop
'Combing' streaks are visible as the image is pushed to the max

Update: I believe my 'flats' were actually 'bias' frames, I'm not sure how that may have affected my DSS session but I might try re-stacking with my bias frames in the appropriate spot.

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