Ngc 6604

Image Critiques Nightscape & Astro Critiques
1

NGC 6604
NGC 66041800×1800 699 KB

A very young star nebula cluster in the Milky way core… fairly non descriptive nebula, one of the few bright Nebula’s that has no nickname…
Imaged over last 3 nights (6 hours total) with Astro camera and telescope in my front yard, Portland Oregon.

Specific Feedback Requested

Colors are pretty much fantasy, I brought out the blue oxygen but the nebula is usually Hydrogen Red. Any opinions appreciated.

Technical Details

900mm view.
PP in Astropixel, Pixinsight, Affinity, Capture, Photoshop.
I use something in all of them.

2

Oh my. This is beautiful. You really outdid yourself with this one. The colors are wild and exotic. Oh, and thank you for not posting this in the abstracts forum.

3

Wonderful image, Dan. Excellent capture and processing. This is indeed a stunning image. Thanks for putting it up here. I love it.

4

Fantastic Dan! Love your color interpretation - the combo of red and bubble-gum turquoise is very cool!

I must tell you that I think you’ve nailed your “star spikes” with this presentation. I think like the 3 Little Bears story… “Just right…” :slight_smile:

Amazing work continues. thanks for sharing.

Lon

5

Utterly beautiful, Dan. And to think you got this with a front yard telescope. Wow! I hope you’re readying your many images for a cool book.

6

Thanks all, I appreciate it,
Astrophotography is way easier than most think, several of my friends in Portland are doing this,
all of us Landscape, Bird, Nature photographers who just wanted to do something new.
Same concept except framing and comps take some time to figure out…
Equipment is really user friendly…
Not expensive, my Astro kit which is medium high end is total $5000, less than the new Z9 camera body.
You need to enjoy processing…

1 Like
7

Another very beautiful astrophotography! I really like these types of images, and this one is very good. The colors, light and distribution of gases make up a great composition.

8

Dan,

Absolutely surreal. It still amazes me how you manage to determine the colors. Do you simply choose or is there something in the light itself that dictates the colors. You mentioned bringing out the oxygen, and its blue color, but that the nebula is usually red due to hydrogen. How do you determine what gases are producing the light? I also like the star spikes. Is that also a post processing technique or is that achieved in camera using a filter?

9

Thanks Youssef,
The colors are kind of subjective but they are not manufactured. When you process in Pixinsight it has a mix channel feature where you can add various amounts of the R,G,B channels to obtain the colors… The color is there, you simply bring out what you want… The filters used in Astro setups define the colors of the various gases which show up in the images…
The spikes are a Photoshop plugin software feature.

10

Thanks Dan for that information. So are the images you capture with a dedicated Astro camera colored when you open the file and then you mix in the colors, or monochrome and then blend in the color?

11

Yes I am shooting with a color astro camera and the Raw stack is in color…
I separate the image into R,G,B channels in post processing.
I am probably going to get a Mono camera where you blend the channels manually after shooting and stacking the channels separately. Mono takes more imaging time but gives a more accurate color representation and is preferred by a lot of Astrophotographers.