Horsehead Nebula

[Whitters]

Nebulosity arround zeta Orions
300mm F2.8 MX916 binned 2x2
5 minutes (5 x 60 second exposure)
Hydrogen alpha filter (lumicron)

[Rocket Pooch]

I need shorter lunch breaks

[Mike]

Paul that is spectacular !!! You have got to combine that with the colour data from another image.

[Whitters]

Say how did you do that Chris???

[Rocket Pooch]

2 positive histogram stretch, 1 negative stretch all in Photoshop to bring out the detail.  Smoothed it using SGBNR application then back into Photoshop for a contrast adjustment.

Before the stretch's I masked out the bright stars using a Marquee mask and inversed the selection.

There you go.  

All the data was from your original posted on this forum with no additions at all.

Show you next time we meet.

[Whitters]

Well impressed

[Rocket Pooch]

All I need is my own Deep Sky camera now and I can stop knicking other peoples work.

[Rick]

The top version seems to contain more detail than the lower one, but at a lower overall brightness. The lower one has pulled up the nebulosity but has somehow lost the very faint stars. The tricky thing with image processing is knowing when to stop.

[Rocket Pooch]

Yes agreed, the thing is normally you would probably get the star detail and depth from a b/w element and then overlay the cloud detail.

But you're right, too ,much fiddling.