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Kevin Morefield's picture

The Elephant Trunk

A star forming nebula about the size in the sky of a silver dollar at arms length. The baby stars are the equivalent of 4 days old in a human lifetime.

Captured in my backyard in Portland Oregon over many nights this last month. About a 150 ten minute exposures were stacked. 530mm focal length with a monochromatic camera using the Sony full frame 61 mpix sensor. Specific narrowband color filters were used to allow color to be captured.

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14 Comments

I want this printed billboard size and on my wall. I can look at this for hours. The color tones and highlights make this fine art. 5 stars.

Thank you Phillip. I have a big 4K TV I like to look at it on!

Love your astro stuff, I just started and it's so technically challenging! Your post production seems flawless to me

Thank you! I’m 5 years in now and starting to feel like I know what I’m doing. It would have been much easier if I was expert at Photoshop but I had to learn that too. Adam Block’s video tutorial series was the basis for my learning.

very nice work and perfectly framed. Is it HOO or SHO color palette?

Neither really. The reds are S+H, the Greens are O, and the Blues are O - S/2. The luminance channel is all H.

Looks great. I’ve had good results with just bicolor doing:
R - Ha
G - 15-20% Ha 80-85% Oiii
B - Oiii

And thanks!

Dude, you need to make a YouTube video of this process. 👏🏼

Curious what people use to screen capture for these instructional videos?

There is a free software called "Open Broadcast Software" or "OBS" for short. People use it not only for recording themselves but also for streaming themselves live too. There are loads of tutorials on youtube that will teach you how to set it up as well.

Very nice. This is one of the sharpest cosmic images I have ever seen. nice job!

Thanks Chris! It’s somewhat deceiving because of the large field of view. This is with a new full frame 61 mpix camera that has only recently camera out for astronomy.

Because stars are all just points of light with differing brightness, the size of the object being big (allowed by the large field of view) makes the stars look relatively small and thus sharp. I have a large telescope in an observatory that shoots technically much sharper/higher resolution images but the stars end up looking big compared to the other stuff in the frame.

Impressive work, well done!