Spooky, Nebulous Fingers.

WE pointed the twenty inch at the Eastern Sky, so we could get a nice long exposure without rotation. Rising nice and high is the constellation Auriga, the charioteer, and in its centre lie some interesting patches of nebulosity. The "spooky, nebulous fingers" in this photo are otherwise known as the central part of IC405. There's a nice bright guide star here for us. I got 30 minutes worth of luminance, colour and dark images, using the Atik at -20 C, binning 3x3. I stacked in MaximDL then processed by blurring the colour frames, aligning and colour combining. An auto flat overdid things, so I averaged the autoflat corrected frame with a copy of the uncorrected frame. Next, I ran Digital Development and liked the contrasty effect, so I did the same thing with this. I couldn't mamange to get bright colours, they just don't seem to be there in this object. I think nebula filters Ha OIII Hb are the way to go! I did a small manual detrail using 'layers' and 'darken' on it to get round stars. This object is also somewhere in my past blog. Hopefully this pic is an improvement.