Comet 88P Howell

[cometcatcher]

Little Comet 88P / Howell is still about in the morning sky. Near it's peak now, around mag 9? And that's about the best we have until later in the year. 41 x 30 seconds with the Bintel 8" F4, Pentax K-5, HEQ5 Pro unguided out the window. :P

[nebulosity.]

Nice shot Kevin,

I have been trying to find ways of reducing colour noise and I played with your image and it worked quite well.

What I did was apply some really aggressive noise reduction to your image until all the colour blotches were smoothed out, and then blended that with the original as an LRGB image. Using the original as the L, the noise reduced as the RGB, the result is no colour blotches!

You can then up the saturation etc, without having the colour noise turning yuk.

I thought I'd let you know as it seems to work well and might be useful technique with your short integration comet images.

1. original.
2. smoothed.
3. LRGB blended. (with some added contrast)

Cheers
Jo

[cometcatcher]

Thanks Jo. The technique seemed to work quite well.