Orion & Taurus

Lovely clear night out. Got a bit cloudy so came in and took a break. The sky was REALLY clear earlier and for the first time I managed to see the Horsehead Nebula. I couldn't make out the horsehead shape but could see the nebula alright. I used as wide a FOV as possible - in my case a 17mm nagler + f6.3 focal reducer on my 8"SCT with a UHC filter. Because the Nebula is so big, the only way I could confirm it was there was by slowly slewing the scope from side to side. I could see the background sky get a little darker when I moved away from it and slightly brighter when pointing in the right direction, confirming it's presence. Pleiades were also very nice and I could just about detect 13 stars to the naked eye.
Anyway, moving onto the purpose of this post, here's a B/W image of Orion and Taurus. It's a 3min exposure 18mm f/3.5 ISO400 RAW image. Used Photoshop to convert to TIFF and Neatimage to remove noise.

I like it Mike! It still looks good, even in B&W. Was that with the 300D?

Seanie.

Thanks Seanie.
Yep, the 300d. I hope to process a few more later.

Picked up some Photoshop tips from Dave Power earlier. Thanks Dave!
As a result, here's another version of the image above processed in colour.

I intentionally added a slight blur to make it more "film-ish" in appearance.
Did it work, or does it just look a bit blurry?

Thats a good transition from B&W to colour. I don't think the blurry effect makes it any better - I'd go for the sharper (original) way it was taken.

S.