Michael‘s Astrophoto Blog

In clear nights that have quite a bit of moonlight I like to take my dual narrowband filter out for a spin. Last week we had a couple of such nights, so a perfect opportunity to gather some data on a few of the summer sky nebula.  Normally I am using a process called HDR multiscale transformation to get a good balance between the bright and the fainter parts of an object. However, in the case of M27 this would have reduced the color of the inner part of the nebula way too much. I went with soft masks for the inner regions instead and stretched these parts manually.   There are still some issues with the images I need to try addressing - e.g. the amplifier glow is not fully corrected, and I partially have a reddish tint. However, overall I am optimistic and think that the pictures are quite pretty and are showing a lot of detail. 

After the galaxy frenzy of the previous months I was planning to take it a bit slower for some time. Usually I had not been observing around the summer solstice with its short and not entirely dark nights. Over many years I developed the habit of picking up visual astronomy again sometime during August. However, this year, concentrating on astrophotography, I really felt the itch to make some photos even shortly after the summer solstice.     With the short nights and moon coming up as well I didn’t feel comfortable going after some dim nebula, so I picked globular clusters as targets.  While some are at their best visibility right now, a few of them were at lower altitude, so I am not entirely satisfied with the results in all cases. However, it is still a nice collection of objects I believe. (M11 is not actually a globular cluster, but it still fits nicely in this series)