We have the winner on CHILESCOPE Astrophotography Processing Contest!

The International CHILESCOPE Astrophoto Processing Competition “Chamaeleon Molecular Cloud” is finished and has been a great success. 55 works were collected! CHILESCOPE team really appreciate all your effort, skills and patience. Despite the fact that this contest was the “light” one and calibrated images were provided we are pretty sure a lot of work, skills and knowledge were involved to achieve such fantastic results! This time we focused on post- processing.

We really hope all participants got useful experience processing the data. Indeed, this is the main benefit of this experiment. Also there is a unique chance to compare the different methods and strategies of processing the same object. For us it was very hard to make a final decision. The best results are pretty much the same in quality and each of them has unique features. But after a long conversation, we finally managed to choose an overall winner. And the winner is TA-DA-A-A-A-A! Mathieu Guinot with his result

We hope all of you will share our and respect to Mathieu and his brilliant masterpiece!

Comments from jury members:

Sergey Pogrebisskiy:

“Dust clouds are one of my favorite DSO. It always looks so mysterious and bewitching! The dust divides the space into 3 layers. Behind the dust- dust- in front of dust. Part of stars are shining through the dust and change their color and brightness. Some are in front and have natural colors. One should expect multidimensional, 3d picture to reflect this dramatic scene. No doubt the prize work fully meets these expectations!

1. Stars have natural colors and are relatively small size.

2. Background color is neutral. Obviously, there were color gradients on the row images but the author did efficient job to neutralize them.

3. Details are very fine but not over sharpened. The borders between dust clouds and nebulas are very smooth and look natural. One can see the finest details in the clouds structure.

4. 3D detected! Local contrasts in different fields of the image are optimal with no over enhancement. The author successfully used all huge dynamic range of this field.

5. Color intensity is optimal across the image - not to pale or too grossly saturated.

6. S/N ratio is very good being a successful compromise between a highly detailed image and optimal noise reduction”.

Damian Peach:

"Mathieu's processing of this challenging subject is excellent and strikes an ideal overall balance. Colour rendition is also just right. A really fine piece of work he should be very proud of!"

Stas Volskiy:

“In modern astrophotography, where high quality image data and the latest processing techniques are available to every amateur, the most important thing is to achieve a good balance in the final image and fulfil the hidden potential in the row images. Matthew did it his best. The overall balance is excellent. The size of the stars is optimal. The balance between noise and blur is preserved. Dynamic range of the dust nebulae is show fully!

Allow me to highlight a few point, because details are important to me:

1.Small galaxy PGC32994 at the bottom of the image. Difference in color in the center and on the periphery is shown.

2. SED110 reflection nebula. Colors gradients between blue and yellow are shown ably”.

5 best works awarded by the jury without ranking:

Jean-Baptiste Auroux

Marcel Drechsler

Robert Eder

Utkarsh Mishra

Michael Deger

Dear winner, please register on our web site at www.chilescope.com and send your account name to support@chlescope.com. 1000 points will be transferred to your account immediately.

IMPORTANT Prize points can be spent on 1mRC telescope (Telescope1 on the web portal) for one object of your choice. One more time and good luck in future imaging! CHILESCOPE team.