You’ve heard about the coming conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. Here is my first picture of it, taken Friday evening (12/4). I used my C11 with Hyperstar and ASI 294MC Pro camera. This is a single image one second long. The field of view is about 2 degrees by 1.2. At this scale there are no details to speak of but you see the moons of Jupiter in the lower right pointing at the oval of Saturn in the upper left. As they get closer, I’ll be able to go to a smaller scale and see more details.
I’ve reworked this image a bit. I watched a video and got some ideas. I split the three channels out and processed each individually before recombining. The capture was with an L-eNhance filter that lets in Ha, OIII, and Hb. The Ha is red of course, the OIII is kind of green and Hb is kind of blue so I pretended it was a clear cut split for the three colors and frequencies. Anyway, once split I did one automatic levels stretch on each and one manual curves on each. Then on green and blue I did a brightness/contrast layer (two for the blue I think) to try to get them close to the contrast level seen in the red without the extra work. Then recombine, crop, and dust enhance and star size reduction actions. Although the colors are not “real”, I like the results.
I decided to spend Thanksgiving evening at the River Ridge Observatory shooting the North American Nebula (NGC 7000). I shot this nebula a few months ago but I decided to do so again to see what I’ve learned since then. The Moon was near full but I used my Optolong L-eNhance filter to restrict wavelengths to Hydrogen Alpha and Oxygen III. I used my C11 with Hyperstar, it was auto-guided and this image was made from 12 5-minute subs with flats and darks applied. All post processing was done in Photoshop. I was a little aggressive in processing to bring out the details in the center, but the reddish hue at top and bottom volunteered itself.
