Reprocessing Leo

I've spent the evening reprocessing the Leo image I took the frames for the other night. After innumerable restacks, or at least it feels like it. I finally spotted something that was probably guaranteed to mess up the final image. I found I'd included in the stack a short exposure, out of focus framing shot I'd taken. Doh... How silly. Anyway, I removed it from the list of frames in DSS, set a border to cut out the house and restacked. This time, the image looked a lot better. I saved it off, and loaded it into Photoshop, where I played with Levels and Curves to bring out the detail, then used Noel's actions to remove the space noise, enhance the star colour and other things. I think this looks a lot better than my original, and it's not really that surprising I guess. Anyway, here's the result.


I've also been asked for pictures of my Baader Clickstop in action. Got to find me a second camera. Hmm, now where did my wife leave hers ? I also figured out why I had so much Vignetting on the test image. I was using the 5mm Hyperion which has an exit pupil of 1mm. The objective on my camera is about 35mm. That's a huge difference. I'm not certain I'll get much better out of the 17mm Hyperion. I may have to just piggyback my camera and try a few other things, like a full zoom powered motion shot of a cluster or three, and use my wifes camera on the Clickstop. Hmm, this is going to get interesting.