Pleiades M45 (2022) (matthew.maclean)

Pleiades M45 (2022)

I had a lot of clear weather the whole month of October into early November, so I finally got a chance to really go after M45. Even though it is a very bright cluster, the surrounding nebulosity was a lot more challenging than I realized. In the end, I spend almost 18 hours imaging, but I am quite happy with the resulting data. I was very encouraged that I am able to see a lot of the faint background even in Bortle 7-8 conditions with such a long integration time. Removing the LP gradients is always tricky, but I compared my resulting image to several good ones here on Astrobin and most of the faint structures look very similar to mine!

The long capture integration made this image very forgiving to stretch to my taste; that is rare for the broadband images I typically get. I stretched the image a little on the bright side because I like seeing all the background structure so clearly. I also tried a final stretch with GHS and got similar results (Revision B) but it is a nice alternative I am still learning how to use to its full capability. I saved a less aggressive version with a dimmer background too (Revision C) for those that prefer it. Let me know if anybody has any strong preferences. After stretching, I did a Photometric-Color-Calibration just to try to get the star colors as realistic as possible from the light-polluted skies.

The final revision (D) is a composite I made of the raw integrations appending each night of data and using the default stretching from Astro Pixel Processor (no smoothing or other processing). Even the left image data looks nice I think, but I can see the differences in how the dimmer regions are fuller and smoother with each addition of capture time. We all know capture time helps, especially in light polluted skies, but I always find it interesting to see such examples.

Final
Original
B
C
D

B

Title: GHS stretched version

Uploaded: ...

C

Title: dimmer background version

Uploaded: ...

D

Title: comparison of integration time

Uploaded: ...

Northeast Imagers
Broadband under Bortle 7/8/9
William Optics GT Series
Light Polluted skies

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	6565278
PixInsight job	SBBVFG0FVI72SWRNOYP62SSTTB15OTAQ
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	03h46m30s.21
RA (top/left)	03h42m04s.34
RA (top/right)	03h42m00s.81
RA (bottom/right)	03h50m49s.99
RA (bottom/left)	03h51m06s.23

Dec (center)	+24°11′31″.3
Dec (top/left)	+25°42′27″.9
Dec (top/right)	+22°41′32″.7
Dec (bottom/right)	+22°40′01″.4
Dec (bottom/left)	+25°41′00″.3

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