I was not able to process the shots from last Saturday in Buso-buso as we went on a family vacation in Hong Kong. As soon as we arrived, I started to process the first object which was a very faint reflection nebula in Scorpious. I have been waiting for a trip to a dark site for this as the Scorpion was not visible from our house. The sky at Buso was remarkable last Saturday. The Summer Milky Way was beaming and I could feel the perspective of being in its outer spiral arms. The temptation of shooting many objects that night was simply overpowering. But I had to stick to my two planned objects. I did not use my telescope for this object as it was large. The 70-300mm lens was used on the 350D for capturing IC4592, the so-called Blue Horsehead. There's not much images of it on the web and most if not all were taken using very high end equipments. I was wondering how it would look like using just a camera zoom lens and DSLR. At first I felt I was just wasting my time as the subs did not register even the slightest hint of nebulosity. I merely used the guidepost stars to approximate the nebula's location for framing. Worse, I made a mistake in getting the flat-light frames. Just what I had expected the stacked image didn't turn out well. The image was very faint, the background gradient was uneven, and noise was unbearable. Initially, I wanted to give up on it but I tried to convince myself that I could learn more by challenging my skills on Photoshop. I made aggressive stretching to bring out the colors in addition to heavy background gradient control. This is a 3-hour long total exposure at F6.3, ISO 800. I planned to re-visit this object using my Megrez 90 and do some mosaic.
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