| Rob Hawley's Pages | Almaden Observatory Main Page |
| Project Overview |
|
The full size image above
is rather intimidating to navigate (even for me). Thus I
extracted several interesting areas from the full size image. Click
for a full size image.
This image consists of 7 sections each composed of a number of 900
second images taken using the H alpha filter. Section 3 was
abandoned since there were no interesting objects observed.
| Section |
#Images |
|---|---|
| 1 |
31 |
| 2 |
22 |
| 4 |
17 |
| 5 |
15 |
| 6 |
19 |
| 7 |
8* |
| 8 |
20 |
* This was a section that joined
section 2/6 to 5/8.
The sections were combined using GradientMergeMosaic. This
mostly worked, but I found I had to remove some bright stars from the
edges using CloneStamp to prevent artifacts. However, I missed
one. I will leave it to the reader to find it.
When processing the images I chose to magnify the background
nebulosity. While the bright objects may have lost some contrast,
I felt the overall result was better. I did this by creating a
mask using curves to isolate a section of the brightnesses and
then applied CurvesTransformation to the masked image. You
probably could have also done this directly, but I needed the mask
anyway for noise reduction so I just repurposed it.
Masked
stretch was used to improve the images of brighter stars.
Harry's shed provides an example
of this process.
