Pleiades (Jeff Rothstein)

Pleiades

Revision title: OSC Revision

The Pleiades cluster, Messier 45, is about 450 light years away, so a next-door neighbor in galactic terms. It's a young cluster, with its dominant stars only about 100 million years old. Their bright blue color illuminates the remaining dust and gas in the cluster. Here is a luminance-only version of M45, the Pleiades.

This was part of a test project to see if I could control the usually blown-out main stars of the cluster from start to finish. I iterated exposure times watching the number of saturated pixels for each frame (NINA is great for that purpose). I usually try to keep saturated pixels at <1000; here I allowed the number to be a little higher since the saturated pixels would be concentrated in the brightest stars. I'm still working on the RGB image, as it's proving tricky to bring out the nebulosity without brightening the background or bright stars too much. But in the course of that work I happened to create a luminance frame for a mask, and I thought it looked promising on its own. The image had already been stretched, so I adjusted the stretch gently with HT to brighten the target and darken the background, then I increased local contrast with LHE, ran NoiseXterminator, and finished with Bill Blanshan's Star Reduction tool.

This is also one of my first unguided images, relying on a small all-sky model created with Astro-Physics software. Thus far this approach produces better guiding than PHD2 alone, as expected, but so far adding PHD2 for bump guiding doesn't seem to make much difference.

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Title: OSC Revision

Description: Here is the OSC version of the image. After careful stretching in Generalized Hyperbolic Stretch, I found that I could increase the "pop" of the image with a simple midtone stretch in Histogram Transformation. I made extensive use of Localized Histogram Equalization, through a series of GAME masks, to increase the bring out the many threads of nebulosity across the cluster.

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Status	Basic success
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Astrometry.net job	9084848
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Revision title: OSC Revision

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Revision title: OSC Revision

Pleiades

Revision title: OSC Revision

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