Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Taurus (Tau)  ·  Contains:  Barnard's Merope Nebula  ·  IC 349  ·  LBN 770  ·  LBN 771  ·  LBN 772  ·  M 45  ·  Maia Nebula  ·  Merope Nebula  ·  NGC 1432  ·  NGC 1435  ·  PGC 13696  ·  Pleiades  ·  The star 18Tau  ·  The star Atlas (27Tau)  ·  The star Celaeno (16Tau)  ·  The star Electra (17Tau)  ·  The star Merope (23Tau)  ·  The star Pleione (28Tau)  ·  The star Sterope I (21Tau)  ·  The star Taygeta (19Tau)  ·  The star ηTau  ·  VdB20  ·  VdB22  ·  VdB23
Messier 45 Pleiades - November 2021, Paul Macklin
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Messier 45 Pleiades - November 2021

Messier 45 Pleiades - November 2021, Paul Macklin
Powered byPixInsight

Messier 45 Pleiades - November 2021

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Description

My first focused work on the Pleiades in over a year, since learning to work with cooled astro cams, upgrading to a cem26, and working a lot on processing technique. I was going to just work on the California Nebula, but two back-to-back clear nights with nearly moonless skies were just too good to pass up! 

I used very minimal Topaz: 1/100 remove noise, 0 on all other settings. Photoshop work was primarily to bring out some of the nearby star-illuminated dust clouds. Here, decreasing contrast (to bring out the dust clouds) and then slightly bumping up vibrance to bring back slightly washed out colors. 

I'd imagine some deconvolution in PI could bring out the dust clouds even further, but that's a learning curve for 2022. :-)


Oh, one note: this is with no filter. I found that for my particular optical train, the venerable Optolong L-pro created a green comet-like blob artifact, from internal reflections of very bright stars. This blob artifact only appears for the ZenithStar 61ii + Flat61A + Optolong L-pro + asi533mc pro. No such blob for the 0.8x reducer or if removing the filter. Strange.

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Messier 45 Pleiades - November 2021, Paul Macklin