Long time ago in a galaxy far far away...there was a spider
by Nicht

Comment:
I will search for which raw formats are allowed, as those captured with my digital camera are clearly not. But the meta data is available. I also want the record to show who would not have won blue had this technicality not been an issue.



Forum post about it

Message edited by author 2026-01-27 01:17:34.

Long time ago in a galaxy far far away...there was a spider
by Nicht

Comment:
I will state that I do disagree, as this information is available on the images that I submitted. An example is shown below.

Long time ago in a galaxy far far away...there was a spider
by Nicht

Comment:
Thank you!

For the colour I did more or less half the time with each filter, but in sequences of 3-minute exposures. Oiii is a teal colour and H-alpha is quite a deep red. The images are stacked to reduce noise and increase signal, and the final image can then be stretched with the histogram to bring out the detail.

To combine the two stacks, I use the following equations:
Red = Ha
Green = ((Oiii*Ha)^~(Oiii*Ha))*Ha + ~((Oiii*Ha)^~(Oiii*Ha))*Oiii
Blue = Oiii

Using filters helps to cut through the light pollution. I prefer a mono camera as well - for colour cameras there are filters which combine the different wavelengths, but you only get a portion of each pixel per colour. With mono you have the entire pixel to capture photons for a particular filter.

Girl with an ice cream
by LevT

Comment:
This was my favourite for the challenge. Beautiful image!

Long time ago in a galaxy far far away...there was a spider
by Nicht

Comment:
Wow, what a great surprise. I'm so glad my image was well received.

This is NGC 2070, the Tarantula nebula in the LMC, so a truly remarkable thing. It's said that if it were as near to us as the Orion nebula, it would cast a shadow.

In my original comment I had only gotten Oiii data, but we had unexpected clear gaps so I added Ha, but didn't edit my comment.

This was taken with an Svbony SV605MC (Sony IMX533 mono), which is a square crop sensor. The telescope is an Svbony SV503 102mm with the 0.8x focal reducer, at 571.2mm. The filters were 7nm H-alpha and 7nm Oiii. The total imaging time was around 5 hours, but I'm not exactly sure how much I used in integration, but it wasn't much less than 5 hours.

Hello My Winterland
by Mona

Comment:
This is a beautiful shot. I think it's just the highlights that were taken a bit too far which bring it down a touch for me.

Space Needle
by Lydia

Comment:
This is truly remarkable! I love it.

Looking Up and Down
by mlu

Comment:
I understand why you received the score you did, and it is a bit of a stretch for the challenge, but sometimes I just really love a photo, and this is one of those (I was the 10).

Ballerina
by Lyra

Comment:
Congrats on your blue!! Well deserved.

Fangs
by RianBotes

Comment:
Is that looking towards Tseketseke?