It's early in the morning Friday. If it's clear out I could decide to go out to HJRO and try to get another shot of Ison. I'm to tired to even think about that right now. I'm going to post some photos, I threw together from early this morning/last night's session.
I'll keep the comments brief. I used Photoshop, Neat Image Pro to filter noise, and Preview on the Macintosh. To stack images I used Deep Sky Stacker on the PC. I acquired most of the shots from the Canon EOS under control of Backyard EOS on the PC.
I took a few test shots from live looping auto guiding mode from the Orion Star Shoot camera. I processed and worked on a few of those black and white test images. This was while it was guiding, a 2, 5 or 10 second exposure. I was able to even get some half decent (for the cost of that camera) black and white iamges from the auto guider as well.
Enough comments. Here's some of the photos.
I took some images of Comet Lovejoy. Most of my Canon EOS images still need to be processed. I worked on processing this image I actually took with the auto guider as a test image. This actually shows Lovejoy pretty well, for a short exposure black and white astrophotography camera.
Comet Lovejoy above: (trying to pull to much out of the image results in much of the checkerboard noise we see in the photo above.)
All black and white images from the Orion Star Shoot auto-guiding camera (comet LoveJoy above and M42 further down) were processed in Nebulosity, Neat Image pro and Preview. There is a lot of noise in those images, so I used Neat Image pro to reduce some of it.
Above: Aan image of Comet ISON taken at F7 through the C14. This image was stacked from about 3 images. I was taking a lot of images at F11 through the C14, but then found F7 worked much better. The coma is basically the comet's actual color, green. This image shows more black and white than green, due to poor processing on my part and a desire to show as much of the comet's tail as I could. The comet appears white because it's overexposed and my processing for this photo didn't keep it's slight green color. With a more sensitive camera and better processing, we'd likely see more dust details in the comet's tail than shown above. It's also difficult to tell if much of the dust is lost in haze or cloud's in this photo.
Earlier in the evening, I took a few photos of the Orion nebula. I was testing the focus of my Canon EOS. I decided to take a few stills with the Orion Star Shoot Guider to see what it could do while in guiding mode. A 4 second and 10 second exposure were combined and processed to create the photo above. There is still some noise, in the photo above depending on how bright you view it. I probably tried to push this image to much and made it to bright. I used Nebulosity, Photoshop(?), Preview, Neat image Pro and Photomatix HDR programs to get the results above from the Orion Star shoot. I believe I actually took two passes with Neat Image Pro in between a couple of the other adjustment steps.
I also took some photos earlier in the day of The Eskimo Nebula (no photos posted here yet), and a test photo of the Crab nebula (M1). I didn't get enough exposure of the Crab Nebula to process it. I didn't have time to spend on M1.
The above Black and White photo came from a color photo I took of Comet ISON. This was cropped and zoomed in from the wider shot taken from the Meade Refractor. I started out adjusting the color to reduce red and blue sky glow and enhance the natural color of the comet (green). But I decided to also create a black and white version of the image to copy the style of a photo that George Korody sent me. His photo was taken with a black and white camera and took 30 seconds. My photo was taken with the Canon EOS T1i and I combined three exposures totaling 105 seconds if I recall correctly. The three 35 second exposures on the Canon EOS rivaled George's quick Black and White photo.
I actually generated an intermediate photo that overemphasized green for this shot, but decided to combine that photo with the black and white version of it, to tone down the green tone and colors in the one shown below. The photo of ISON below has a little bit of color in it, but it's almost completely Black and White.
Per George's comments: To the left of the comet there is a faint galaxy in this photograph.
"I see that you caught elliptical galaxy NGC4697 (Magnitude 9.2) towards the left side of your image. The bright star below the comet is magnitude 12.85"
Lastly I'll leave you with another image of comet ISON, this was taken with the Orion Star Shoot Auto guider at the end of the session. This camera took a 10 second exposure through the Meade telescope. Not bad for a quick image from an auto guiding camera. The image below was enhanced/adjusted using Nebulosity, Preview, and Neat Image Pro for noise reduction.
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