In the numerous years I have been doing astrophotography, and indeed in the one and half years I have been doing it remotely, this is my very first image of a dark nebula, the LBN603. I was expecting a weak signal from a dark nebula so I expected that perhaps 15 minute exposures would be better than 10 minute exposures. Indeed other images of similar targets showed me people pushing the exposures for longer, so I did the same this time.
I must admit that I was very impressed with the sheer amount of signal achieved in the end. A testament to e-EyE's exceedingly dark night sky, no doubt. This image took 45 hours of total exposure time, with each exposure 15 minutes long as aforementioned. It is a single panel and due to the increased time per exposure, I decided to go for 60 Luminance exposures and 40 exposures for Red, Green and Blue.
This image has certainly made me appreciate dark nebulae more and I will be imaging more of them in the future. I just love their intensity variations, intense colour and how they stand above background stars in a kind of 3D effect. During post-processing's colour calibration stage, I used the PhotometricColorCalibration process with G2V Star selected as white reference. This gave the warmest white balance in the image, closest to what I expected.
This image has certainly made me appreciate dark nebulae more and I will be imaging more of them in the future. I just love their intensity variations, intense colour and how they stand above background stars in a kind of 3D effect. During post-processing's colour calibration stage, I used the PhotometricColorCalibration process with G2V Star selected as white reference. This gave the warmest white balance in the image, closest to what I expected.