I captured this last Tuesday at Paul Haese's dark sky site and it's way better than my last version of this object. Thanks to Chris Venter for some processing tips and for recommending Adam Block's latest tutorials which have been really useful. I counted over 20 small galaxies in the background of the original full frame. I'd be interested in feedback about saturation and colour balance. It looks different on each of my three monitors at home.
Top effort that. Minor comment but you might want to work on the dark halos around some of the brighter stars though. Should be an easy fix
This galaxy will be my next project.
Thanks Dan. Quite a few brighter stars have deep red halos which are often offset to the left. Not sure what's going on here. It might be poor aligning of RGB or maybe I need to deconvolve the red channel to reduce star sizes. Project for another day. I 'm not at all sure that it's an easy fix.
Thanks Chris. It did take a while. I tried your advice about balancing background and highlight levels in CCDStack before transferring to Photoshop. I also aligned Luminance and Colour frames but kept them separate for more tweaks in Photoshop before combining them.
Thanks Dan. Quite a few brighter stars have deep red halos which are often offset to the left. Not sure what's going on here. It might be poor aligning of RGB or maybe I need to deconvolve the red channel to reduce star sizes. Project for another day. I 'm not at all sure that it's an easy fix.
Hadn't really noticed the red halos (still learning the tricks of the trade though). I was referring to some of the brighter stars within the galaxy arms. A method that has worked for me is discussed in The Zone System for Astro Imaging. Basically you use the quick selection tool to select the star (including the halo region) and use curves to increase the brightness of the halo region.
Hadn't really noticed the red halos (still learning the tricks of the trade though). I was referring to some of the brighter stars within the galaxy arms. A method that has worked for me is discussed in The Zone System for Astro Imaging. Basically you use the quick selection tool to select the star (including the halo region) and use curves to increase the brightness of the halo region.
Thanks for the clarification, Dan. I think these are artifacts from sharpening the galaxy. I've used that method before so will give it a go. I've also noticed that the background is quite visibly noisy in the cropped version so will try to smooth this too. Repro coming up.
Thanks Ross and Marc. I've just done a minor repro, smoothing the background and doing some minor star repair. It's rewarding playing around with good data. Would love to have a slightly bigger scope for objects like this to reduce those star sizes.
