It was almost a full moon last night, which made it very difficult for observing Holmes. However, I put together the following composite of 4 images using Photoshop. It's a fairly accurate representation of the sky looking East yesterday evening - it was a challenge to faithfully represent such a wide range of relative magnitudes in a single image. The moon, Holmes and the stars are all in their exact relative positions with Holmes almost exactly the same apparent size as the moon.
(http://homepage.ntlworld.com/the_shelleys/photos/holmes_fullmoon_23112007.jpg)
That's an interesting perspective. :)
In the image above I used an exposure of 1/1000s for the moon and 20min for the comet. This is a massive dynamic range. But I've read that Photoshop CS3 allows you take a number of different images of the same subject but at different exposures and merge them into a single HDR (high dynamic range) image of 32 bits per channel. So the resultant single HDR image could faithfully represent the entire dynamic range of that iamge set. It can then be reduced to 16bit then 8bit adjusting the response curve as you go. I might download the trial version and give it a go. Has anyone tried anything similar?
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