Scope: C8 f/2.8; Location:
Del Mar CA; 4 Apr. 2005; Camera: ToUcam SC3
Exposure: 16 x 30 sec and 16 x 10 sec with Orion Skyglo and Baader IR
Block for Luminance exposures; 16 x 15 sec R,G,B exposures.
Processing: All exposures captured in K3CCDTools 2. Alignment and stacking was done with Registax
3 and saved as FITs. LRGB channels were co-registered in IRIS. Luminance and Color channels were scaled and rough color balanced in
IRIS. The luminance channel was constructed with the with the 30 sec
exposure as the base exposure; the 10 sec exposure was used to reduce star size
on the larger stars. LRGB channels were resized to 800x600 prior to LRGB
combine. Final LRGB combine was done in Photoshop using Luminance Layering (or
LLRGB). Color
balancing and final touches were done in Photoshop (Blue halo subtraction and
background noise subtraction). SGBNR (PixInsight LE) was used to smooth
remaining background on the final result. Final image size is approximately 800x600.
This image was a guided exposure. NGC 2539, located in the constellation Puppis,
is the cluster in the image. NGC 2539 roughly center in this image is estimated
to be 4,000 light years distant. The bright star in the lower left is "19
Puppis" and is estimated to be only 185 light years distant - so it is a
foreground star. North is up in this image. T. Horizontal FOV is about 30'.
Image center is at Equatorial 2000: RA: 08h 10m 37s Dec: -12°49'14"