Comet Lulin

This is the picture I took of Comet Lulin in the early morning of Satuday, Feb. 21, 2009, from our back yard in Draper, Utah. This view is cropped from a wider field of view photo taken with a Nikon D40X digital SLR camera, using a 55 mm lens, at f 4.0, iso 800, time exposure of 30 seconds. The comet is the bluish smudge, left-center in the photo. (Click on photos to enlarge.)

Last week, Nathan, Scott and Sam and I attended a lecture, sponsored by the Salt Lake Astronomical Society, in which Tyler Allred explained his imaging and editing magic. Tyler is an expert astronomical imager in Tremonton, Utah. (See his dazzling images on his website at http://www.allred-astro.com/gpage8.html . I was so impressed with Tyler's abilities, I sent him this photo of Comet Lulin, and invited him to try his editing magic on it. I wanted to know if Tyler's techniques could be used to enhance even my simple photos. Tyler produced the version below, which is much improved, and described his process of editing as follows:

"I am using Photoshop CS3, but there may be a more recent version out. (Yes, CS4) I just did a quick version with your data. I used Focus Magic (Photoshop plug-in program) to remove the trailed stars. Then I did some curves and levels adjustments in Photoshop. I broke my own rule and forced the background to black because there was quite a bit of blotchy noise there. That is normal when using only 1 frame. The resulting image is not bad. Keep up the good work."