My second deep sky image was of the Pleiades using a Canon 70-200mm F/2.8 zoom at 200mm. You can find it
here. It was less than an hour of data taken from a Bortle 7 sky. I was excited about it at the time but even then I knew I could do better eventually. Now is eventually.
This isn't the ultimate in M45 renditions but it's a couple of orders of magnitude better than my first effort and I'm pretty happy about that!
This was taken using some outstanding equipment belonging to a friend with a remote observatory in West Virginia. I started this in January and lost essentially all of February due to bad weather but was able to finish getting some data in March. I was able to get a total of 14 hours almost equally split among red, green and blue.
Processing was relatively straightforward:
on each R, G and B master:
mure denoise
DBE
channel combination
On the combined master:
deconvolution
PCC (had to define a background region of interest to get PCC to neutralize the background)
HT
LHE
CT (contrast and slight color boost)
Adv Sharpening
Adam Block's star reduction
I'm not 100% sure I'm done with processing this one but I think this is a good first cut.
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