Edit 10/25/2021: This image was featured by AAPOD 2! You can check it out here: https://www.aapod2.com/blog/grand%20pleiades
Perhaps the most famous star cluster on the sky, the bright stars of the Pleiades can be seen without binoculars from even the depths of a light-polluted city. With a long exposure from a dark location, though, the dust cloud surrounding the Pleiades star cluster becomes very evident.
Two techniques were used to get this image: framing selection and downsampling. I chose only about 65% of the frames that I actually shot, removing bad signal from out of focus, cloudy, or polluted frames. I also downsampled the image by 50% increasing snr and the amount of dust I imaged.
Image:
Equipment:
- Nikon D90
- Sigma 300mm prime lens
- Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer
- Star Adventurer Tripod
- Bahintov Mask
- Intervalometer
- DIY diffraction spikes
- Stellarium
- All Sky Plate Solver
- Nina
Acquisition:
- ISO 800, f/4.0
- Taken from a bortle 2 zone during the new moon.
- Taken on 10/4, 10/6, 10/7, 10/8
- 231 x 3′ light frames (11.2 hours)
- 200 total flat frames
- 67 dark frames
- 200 bias frames
Processing:
- WBPP for calibration
- Normalize scale gradient +ESD stacking
- Crop away stacking artifacts
- DBE
- Color calibration
- Noise reduction
- Repair HSV separation
- ArcsinH stretch
- Starnet + exponential transform + pixel math to enhance nebulosity
- MMT, histogram transformation, curves transformation, Local histogram – Multiscale processing
- HDR multiscale transform
- Local histogram equalization
- Curves transformation