North America Nebula Attempt - help?

Guys,

With the greatest of respect to all concerned, I think we need to take a step back and stop blaming the tools. I'm not disputing the red insensitivity of the 300d here, its known and documented

Take a look at this image again, the issue here IMHO is focal lenght, moon in the sky etc. Take that image again with a longer focal lenght to increase contrast and you will see a much more satisfactory color saturation. Take the same shot with something like one of those SBIG STL11000 and no doubt you will get a better result but we need to keep in mind that this is a sub €1000 camera that you dont have to remortgage your house for.

From following a thread in another forum I understand that a h-alpha filter will not solve the problem entirely, not to mention that a full aperture HA filter (even if it does exist) would *probably* cost more than the camera!! (have you seen the cost of even 2" HA filters?) Apparantly the stock filter in the 300d absorbs some HA too. If you want a fully red sensitive camera then its out with the screwdriver and get rid of that stock IR filter!

The camera is just not sensitive to red light, but it does see it

Dave I stand open to correction but I do think its the other way round. I beleive its the IR filter thats the issue not the sensor.

Now back to my opening remarks, what I'm saying is that those of us not fortunate enough to be able to go out and buy red hot (pardon the pun) SBIG gear need to make best use of the tools we do have. Theres no point trying to push a square peg into a round hole. Wide field deep sky imaging is for a moonless sky or dedicated astro cameras with narrowband filters. Horses for courses!!!

SBIG? Pah - Finger lakes

SBIG? Pah - Finger lakes

You didnt?? Did you??

I wish...

I'm mulling over a second hand SBIG at the mo with a grands worth of BVR filters...

You make a very sobering point on focal length. As far as astrophotography goes, in order to achieve the best possible images, you *must* match your imager and scope. That's not to say you can't take images with any combination, of course you can. But to get the *best* results, a bit of forethought is needed. And once you get beyond basic astrophotography and into filtered exposures, well, that's a whole new realy and deeper pockets...!

Cheers

Dave McD

The camera is just not sensitive to red light, but it does see it

Dave I stand open to correction but I do think its the other way round. I beleive its the IR filter thats the issue not the sensor.

you're dead right, I was including all that comes with the camera (inc built in filter) when I said that.

I've captured a number of images using the canon, and its abit of work to get the red out, its faint but it is there.

lumicon do a 2 inch h-alpha filter for 300$. :lol:

Keith,
I had a quick run of your image through photoshop, and you can enhance the red of the nebula but you also enhance alot of red all over the image.
Even if you look closely at the orig image, you can see it has a very faint red glow throughout . Now you can use photoshop to mask out the areas which you know should not be red leaving only the nebula, but it doesn't look very natural, without alot of work.
If you were to use masking, you need to use something like the image in the following link to see where the red is real. With alot of work and effort, you could get realistic hues out of it, but there just seems to be this background red glow swamping the entire image.

www.astrocruise.com/nmw.htm

I still think its a great image, the stars look real sharp and crisp.