M45, The Pleiades (Matt)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Taurus (Tau) · Contains: 11 Tau · 16 Tau · 17 Tau · 18 Tau · 19 q Tau · 20 Tau · 21 Tau · 22 Tau · 23 Tau · 24 Tau · 25 eta Tau · 26 Tau · 27 Tau · 28 Tau · 32 Tau · 33 Tau · 7 Tau · 9 Tau · Alcyone · Atlas · Barnard's Merope Nebula · Celaeno · Electra · IC 341 · IC 349 · IC 353 · IC 354 · LBN 770 · LBN 771 · LBN 772 · And 23 more.

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M45, The Pleiades

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M45, The Pleiades

There's something about the Pleiades. In the Fall and Winter it's the first thing I look for any time I step outside at night... a cluster that's so easy to spot should be easy to image right? Well this is the third time I've shot this cluster and it has been a serious lesson in patient processing. My main goal when I imaged this was to see if I could bring out the faint surrounding dust with shorter exposures (45s at F/4) in my moderately light polluted neighborhood. I was able to bring out some dust after working through the "Screen Mask Invert" method in photoshop for the first time. I didn't do a good job of keeping color in the nebulosity. This will certainly get a revision, but I wanted to post something given how much time I spent on this already.

Also - what I thought was inherent coma on this lens, I suspect is just insufficient backspacing, despite matching the ZWO diagram. The coma didn't really reduce from F/2 to F/4, and it isn't this bad on my DSLR.

It will be a good while before I come back to this object. I'll just enjoy it visually instead.

Original
Final
B

B

Description: Tried to emphasize the dust by boosting the blue hues, especially around the main stars. I didn't push the luminosity as much as I just don't have enough data to do that without introducing noise/artifacts.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5295742
PixInsight job	HRHQHNGX7DIQQ3WG2KJR69FC8LGZQ7OL
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	03h47m01s.78
RA (top/left)	03h32m41s.53
RA (top/right)	03h33m47s.15
RA (bottom/right)	04h00m30s.51
RA (bottom/left)	04h01m06s.95

Dec (center)	+24°04′25″.5
Dec (top/left)	+27°55′52″.4
Dec (top/right)	+20°05′17″.10
Dec (bottom/right)	+20°08′02″.5
Dec (bottom/left)	+27°58′43″.6

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M45, The Pleiades

M45, The Pleiades

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M45, The Pleiades

M45, The Pleiades

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