Centaurus galaxy cluster in colour

[Placidus (Mike and Trish)]

Originally Posted by codemonkey

Epic works guys, "engrossing" as Marcus says. Got to be dedicated to spend that amount of time on one target. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks Lee. The Lum used 3 successful nights plus another 2 or 3 nights of character-building only, due to exploding equipment. We only did one night of colour. Perhaps in retrospect one more night of colour might have helped, but we'd had enough.

Originally Posted by Retrograde

Superb work Mike & Trish.
Lots of fun noodling around the hi-res image scoping out distant galaxies and the detail in those face-on spirals is delicious.

Hi, Pete! Glad you liked it too.

Originally Posted by RickS

Fantastic work, M&T! I just spent 10 minutes doing an annotated version of the luminance to identify PGC166139 only to find out that Colin had already named it It looks particularly stunning in colour. Great to see some detail in even tiny galaxies.

Cheers,
Rick.

Thanks muchly, Rick.

Originally Posted by Andy01

Crikey, Ay Carumba, Jumping Jehosophat, Holy bazillion galaxies Batman!
That's a mighty impressive image guys
Amazing star colours too - No matter what you believe, that just goes to show how amazing the universe is!

That's very kind of you, Andy. We are much encouraged. It's amazing to think that one of those really bright stars is huge, even one of the galaxies has perhaps 200,000,000,000 of those, there are at least a hundred identifiable galaxies in the image, the image is a tiny fraction of the whole sky, and then perhaps it goes on forever.

Originally Posted by strongmanmike

Great shot guys apart from the tight circular spiral, my favourite odd ball object is that coloured clump of seaweed right at the bottom in the middle..I assume it is an irregular galaxy of some type..?

Mike

Thanks, Mike. Can't find anything about that particular galaxy, but it sure looks somewhere in the same general class of beastie as an irregular or dwarf or both.

Originally Posted by Slawomir

A beautiful image M&T that captures the essence or the reason for us pursuing astrophotography.

Thanks, Suavi. That's very kind.

MBJ: When I was tiny, I loved the How and Why type books that explained about the stars, their colours and spectra, how it all worked (and somehow at the same time it was ok enjoy the myths that went with the constellations). Now, at the end (as the Emperor would say) it's wonderful to be able to see some of what's in the thicker books.

Best,
M & T

[Stevec35 (Steve)]

Great stuff M&T. The Centaurus cluster is one of my favourites and to quote a contemporary politician you have captured it bigly.

Cheers

Steve

[cometcatcher (Kevin)]

Very lovely image M&T.

[edwardsdj (Doug)]

Stunning image. One of the best I've seen in a while.

I've been lost in it for about an hour now!

[SimmoW (SIMON)]

Man, how symettrical is that 'main' galaxy??!! I'd call her the Supermodel Galaxy! Gorgeous deep work here M&T

[billdan (Bill)]

Awesome M & T, I also spent a lot of time studying the image. Would make a great A1 poster for around the snooker table.

Bill

[Placidus (Mike and Trish)]

Originally Posted by Stevec35

Great stuff M&T. The Centaurus cluster is one of my favourites and to quote a contemporary politician you have captured it bigly.

Cheers

Steve

Originally Posted by cometcatcher

Very lovely image M&T.

Originally Posted by edwardsdj

Stunning image. One of the best I've seen in a while.

I've been lost in it for about an hour now!

Originally Posted by SimmoW

Man, how symettrical is that 'main' galaxy??!! I'd call her the Supermodel Galaxy! Gorgeous deep work here M&T

Originally Posted by billdan

Awesome M & T, I also spent a lot of time studying the image. Would make a great A1 poster for around the snooker table.

Bill

Steve, Kevin, Doug, Simon, Bill,

Many thanks for your kind encouragement.

[markas (Mark)]

M & T,

Wonderful result for all the time and effort. Great image!

Mark

[Paul Haese]

Nice image Mike and Trish. The hours you put into the colour are really showing here. Back ground is nice and smooth too. A really nice mix of galaxies captured and maybe even some IFN.

[Octane (Humayun)]

That's just staggering. :O :O :O

Awesome work, M&T.

H

[topheart]

Hubblesque!
Wow!

Cheers,
Tim

[Joshua Bunn (Joshua)]

That is Beautiful... nice framing and star colour and that's just to begin with. I've just turned my scope over to this cluster, this is so inspiring. How did you manage to keep the star colour in half hr colour exposures on a 20" scope?

Josh

[Placidus (Mike and Trish)]

Originally Posted by markas

M & T,

Wonderful result for all the time and effort. Great image!

Mark

Originally Posted by Paul Haese

Nice image Mike and Trish. The hours you put into the colour are really showing here. Back ground is nice and smooth too. A really nice mix of galaxies captured and maybe even some IFN.

Many thanks, Paul.

With galaxies we hope to get the colour at least approximately right and then exaggerate differences that tell us about what's going on. Occasionally wondered if exaggerating colour is somehow cheating, but perhaps no more so than using a telescope and long exposures to make it brighter!

Always hard to know when it's IFN and when it's dodgy flats. A big problem with our gear is the camera is very heavy and bolted on using four hard-to-get-at bolts. You can't rotate it. If we could rotate to several different positions during a session, we'd be more confident that we had true IFN. Sigh.

Originally Posted by Octane

That's just staggering. :O :O :O

Awesome work, M&T.

H

Thanks muchly Humayun. That's very encouraging.

Originally Posted by topheart

Hubblesque!
Wow!

Cheers,
Tim

Thanks Tim !

Originally Posted by Joshua Bunn

That is Beautiful... nice framing and star colour and that's just to begin with. I've just turned my scope over to this cluster, this is so inspiring. How did you manage to keep the star colour in half hr colour exposures on a 20" scope?

Josh

Many thanks, Josh. Good hunting with your scope!

How we preserve star colours:

The PlaneWave does tend to produce a rather fat, burned-out, sequin-like disc (due to bad seeing more than optics tracking or collimation), and as you rightly imply, there's nothing one can do about that white core.

But there is always an extended gently fading halo that does not burn out, and happily retains the colour of the individual star, no matter how long the exposure.

Processing matters. A mistake is to start with the image for example even very slightly too blue, and then to crank up the saturation. Now everything is blue. The true colours are irretrievably lost. Trying to balance the colour at this late stage will produce white stars. So we're very careful to get the zero point right, by careful inspection of the highly magnified foothill of the histogram, then balance the colour for the image as a whole (or sometimes just for one or more galaxies of special interest), and only then increase saturation. Being colourblind actually helps here - Mike's not tempted to try doing it by eye, where a wrong white point can hide a wrong black point. It's all done using actual statistics.

Very best,

[Shiraz (Ray)]

keep coming back to this one for another look. what a beautiful image.

The galaxies are clearly the primary attractions, but also really like the star colours - definitely worth the long RGB exposure times.

[Placidus (Mike and Trish)]

Originally Posted by Shiraz

keep coming back to this one for another look. what a beautiful image.

The galaxies are clearly the primary attractions, but also really like the star colours - definitely worth the long RGB exposure times.

Thanks muchly, Ray.