COPYRIGHT, PLEASE NOTE

All the material on this website is copyrighted to J-P Metsavainio, if not otherwise stated. Any content on this website may not be reproduced without the author’s permission.

Have a visit in my portfolio

Monday, November 21, 2011

Pre publishing a small sample of Cygnus mosaic


Final publication tomorrow.


A small part from an eight panel mosaic of Cygnus Nebula area.

This is kind of pre publishing for a large work, I have finalized an eight panel mosaic from the grand nebula of Cygnus constellation. I have finally tamed my super fast camera optics, Canon EF 200mm f1.8. Stars are now absolute pinpoints from edge to edge! I't wasn't an easy task, it took hundreds of iterations to match the CCD  planar to the optical path at accuracy of fraction of microns . Yes, that's the needed accuracy, I almost gave up many times.

An other area from the grande mosaic of Cygnus.

Final publication tomorrow.



Saturday, November 19, 2011

A mosaic from Butterfly to the "Cirrus" area of Cygnus



Nebulae
in constellation Cygnus

A two panel mosaic, bicolor composition from H-alpha (Red) and O-III (Green & Blue).
This combination is very close to a visual spectrum.

A two panel mosaic of H-alpha emission alone.

I noticed, that my two projects, Cirrus of Cygnus and Butterfly to Crescent, are partly overlapping.
I will shoot couple of more panels to build a six panel mosaic from this area, when ever the weather allows me to do so...
I wen trough my raw images for Butterfly to Crescent project and I noticed, there was a one O-III frame usable, others was destroyed by speeding clouds. I processed the O-III frame and made a bicolor mosaic composition at top.


Technical details:

Processing work flow:
Image acquisition, MaxiDL v5.07.
Stacked and calibrated in CCDStack2.
Deconvolution with a CCDStack2 Positive Constraint, 33 iterations, added at 40% weight
Levels, curves and color combine in PS CS3.

Optics, Canon EF 200mm camera lens at f1.8
Camera, QHY9
Image Scale, ~5 arcseconds/pixel
Guiding, Meade LX200 GPS 12" and a Lodestar guider
Filter, Baader 7nm H-alpha and Baader O-III 8,5nm

Exposures for two panels,
Panel 1(Left), 
H-a, 6x600s Binned 1x1
O-III, 1x300s Binned 2x2
Panel 2(Right), 
H-a, 4x900s Binned 1x1
O-III, 6x300s Binned 3x3




Friday, November 18, 2011

Butterfly to Crescent, a new Cygnus project started




A two panel mosaic from the Hydrogen alpha emission.
NOTE. the "Noise" in the background is not a noise but a countless amount of stars!


Last night I was able to shoot two panels in H-a for a new imaging project from Cygnus. At upper left the Butterfly nebula and in middle, the Crescent Nebula.
Clouds rolled in before I was able to shoot any other channels, so colors will follow later.
Canon EF 200 mm at f1.8 is an extreme fast lens to collect photons, only one hour of ten minute subs per panel was needed for good signal to noise.

A closeup to show the resolution.

I just noticed, that this new panorama and my previous project, Cirrus of Cygnusare overlapping!
I hadn't purpose to build a large mosaic but since they are overlapping, in some parts, I will make one.

QHY9 camera is a very good match with wider field camera lenses due the smallish, 5,4 microns, pixel size.
Nowadays  I', processing all under sampled images, like one above, up-scaled 200% to maintain the smallest possible details.  It needs a lots of memory and the processing gpower though! A single, up-scaled gray scale FIT-format, image will take about 500 meg to handle (32bit floating point), usually there are more than a dozen of them...


A gray scale two panel mosaic with my previous project.


Technical details:

Processing work flow:
Image acquisition, MaxiDL v5.07.
Stacked and calibrated in CCDStack2.
Deconvolution with a CCDStack2 Positive Constraint, 33 iterations, added at 40% weight
Levels, curves and color combine in PS CS3.

Optics, Canon EF 200mm camera lens at f1.8
Camera, QHY9
Image Scale, ~5 arcseconds/pixel
Guiding, Meade LX200 GPS 12" and a Lodestar guider
Filter, Baader 7nm H-alpha
Exposures for two panels,
Panel 1, 6x600s Binned 1x1
Panel 2, 6x600s Binned 1x1





Thursday, November 17, 2011

Cirrus of Cygnus as a stereo pair 3D





Parallel vision 3D



NOTE! This is a personal vision about forms and shapes, based on some known facts and an artistic impression.