Saturday, October 3, 2009



Pretty unstable weather around here. I was out on last friday on a cloudless day but clouds rolled in and even rained at night.

Couldn't get much going lately apart from this 3min M45 on 135mm lens.


Looking forward to the Mid-Autumn festival weekend when Northern monsoon is blowing hard.. which i hope will result in a few day's clear.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Is this taken from a dark site in Hong Kong? Or does that IDAS filter work that well?

Thanks!

paulimer said...

It was supposed to be a dark site (limiting mag aroudn 5.5 with directional light pollution from E and N), but because of the haze that night it became a poor place...

I didn't use an LPS on this one though. Mine was attached to the Sky90 and cannot be used when shooting with camera lens.

The "dark" sky you see is due to image processing with proper colour balance =P

Unknown said...

Cool - so basically pulling the RGB and luminance sliders around till you get to something that looks good? Thought you were stacking a bunch of filters...I'm thinking of stacking an H-alpha, IDAS LPR, and maybe a cutoff filter?

paulimer said...

One good way of achieving proper balance is to oversaturate it to see which colour it leans towards then adjust RGB sliders accordingly.

I don't think you need to use H alpha together with LPS... H alpha is a very narrow band and already filters away everything. I haven't tried H alpha myself tho, can't comment on it especially on light polluted skies.

Unknown said...

Awesome. Used that technique in Deep Sky Stacker - and hey it worked!!! finally was able to get my very red pictures to look natural! now i have to practice focusing.

Thanks!