Grus Triplet - Colour added

[codemonkey]

Finally had things fall into place last night; got 4hrs of the sharpest luminance I've managed to date... and this time I actually remembered to turn cooling on ;-)

Was planning on getting more lum tonight but I'm pretty happy with this, so I might just jump straight to RGB.

Edit: Added colour image.

[RickS]

Some nice detail. Looks great, Lee!

[Shiraz]

B' brilliant. yes please, let's see some colour.

[Placidus]

Looking lovely. Super good. Nicely processed.

[codemonkey]

Thanks Rick!



Thanks Ray!



Thanks very much :D Your recent work on this group is the best I've seen; if mine turns out half as good I'll be stoked.

[AlexN]

Very nice mate. I'm still fraught with calibration problems. Just can't get flats looking right. I got the better but still not right.

Good to see you got some solid data for the long weekend.

[Paul Haese]

Lee this is looking like a good lum process. The image is a bit smaller to really see well but it does look very good already. I am keen to see the image once you have the colour too.

[codemonkey]

Cheers mate :)

I saw your post about the flats. Sounds like a royal pain in the nether region. Have you considered stopping down a bit? I know it's throwing away light, but better to have some usable, darker stuff than unusable lighter stuff, right?



Cheers Paul :-)

I got some RGB data last night but I'm having trouble with it; guiding was quite poor compared to previous nights and I've got some annoying halos. I might just try and get new RGB tonight. At the least new B.

Anyway, in the meantime I've reprocessed the lum using drizzle integration as I noticed my stars were a bit square originally. I've attached a 100% crop. Looks to me like the minute guiding errors are enough for drizzle, without dithering.

[strongmanmike]

Hey that crop looks bloody excellent Lee, heaps of detail with no decon or wavelets pseudo detail/artefacts in the galaxies, nice :thumbsup:gotta stamp out thin bright worms and dot detail...(like Smallpox :lol:)

Mike

[Eden]

Excellent work, Lee. :thumbsup: Nice and sharp with no signs of noise. Very interested to see the final product, bring on the colour! :-D

[codemonkey]

Thanks Mike! :-)

Funny thing, this is the "most deconned" image I've ever done as well. Not sure if I'm just getting better at it, or if the better data helped, maybe both.

Definitely some hot pixels still floating around; cosmetic correction didn't pick them all up, but I'll manually clean up on the final processing attempt (is there ever a final one?).



Thanks Brett! :-) Definitely still a bit of noise there; I was careful in processing to keep it to a minimum.

Good to see you back... seemed to disappear for a while!

[strongmanmike]

Oh yes, like most filters, it is very possible to use decon to great advantage to reveal details but without its use being noticeable or even detectable... and that's exactly what you have done here, so most excellent :thumbsup: And hey, I am not anti-decon, just an MDAD (maniac decon artefact detector) sniff, sniff, so if you use decon to sharpen the details in an image and I can't see it, then you have nailed it I recon :D

More data helps most filters, often decon it is only able to be done well in the brighter areas of the image.

Nice work again mate :thumbsup:

Mike

[codemonkey]

Thanks Mike, appreciate that! :-)

I've now added up a colour version (and accidentally lost the lum in the process).

Not sure whether to bother repcaturing the RGB data or not. The halos are annoying.... hmm. Thoughts?

[strongmanmike]

Don't have a problem with those sort of halos at all, optics can do that, not an issue for me :thumbsup:..how'd you lose the LUM??? :eyepop:

Mike

[AlexN]

I think that's top shelf.

Have you tried reducing the star sizes in the blue channel to reduce halos?

[codemonkey]

Thanks Mike :-)

lol. Bad wording there on my part. I accidentally lost the lum attachment in the original post, not the data. I also overwrote the original lum jpeg, so that exact one is gone, but the important stuff remains.

[codemonkey]

Thanks Alex! :-)

Good thinking, I should probably revisit that.

I very, very briefly tried to reduce the star sizes in the red channel, since most of the halos are actually magenta. I didn't try very hard and ended up with cyan borders instead, then I went on to try doing a contour mask and then reducing the saturation... which I also didn't spend much effort on before giving up, exporting it and trying to reduce the magenta in PS.

I think the issue is that the green data is the sharpest, blue the worst and red in the middle. I could also try bloating the green channel a touch as well I guess.

[Atmos]

Halos aside, it is looking bloody brilliant :)

[Somnium]

wonderful work, it looks fantastic

[codemonkey]

Thanks Colin & Aidan :-)

[rustigsmed]

Cooking with gas Lee, very nice!! you are really punching out some nice images now!

Rusty

[Placidus]

Splendid! Lovely colour especially in the right-most of the trio. Well done.

[RickS]

Very nice, Lee. How does it look at full res?

[codemonkey]

Thanks mate! :-)



Thanks very much :-) The right-most is my favourite as well. I think the other two got a bit over-baked to be honest.



Thanks Rick :-)

Full res shows up some warts. You can see the nasty halos I mentioned much more clearly. NGC 7590 and 7599 look a bit over-baked. Can see some noise exacerbation from decon.

Have a look for yourself though, full res is on astrobin, here (http://www.astrobin.com/full/217412/B/?real=&mod=)

There's some cute little galaxy clusters in the full res too, so it's not all bad ;-) PI solving counted 97 galaxies... there's heaps more than that though as a cursory inspection showed many obvious galaxies didn't get identified.

I think I'll leave this for a week or so and then revisit; I tend to see things more clearly when I've stopped looking at it for a while.

[RickS]

Still looks pretty reasonable, Lee. It's always good to leave a little room for improvement. I try to do it all the time :lol: Taking a break is always a good idea when you've been working hard on an image. It's hard to be objective when you're looking at it constantly.

Cheers,
Rick.

[Paul Haese]

The full res shows lots of detail and good colour. If you could gather more data it would reduce the noise level more and if you could reduce the halos on some of those bright stars you would have a ripper of an image.
There is excellent detail in the main galaxies though. :thumbsup:

[codemonkey]

lol Rick. Hard to believe :p

Thanks mate. I think I'm becoming a bit happier with it now actually. It's mainly two stars that are annoying be, but I think it's just because they're partially clipped. Some of the smaller ones have a slightly magenta look, but I'm not that bother by those. I think this is probably my best work to date actually.



Thanks Paul, appreciate that! I think I will come back and reprocess this, see if I can find a way that attacks those couple of blown out stars in a way that doesn't render them looking bad in another way.

As much as I'd like a slightly smoother result, having finally gotten my gear working again I'm a bit like a kid in a candy store so I'm off imaging something else already heh. Maybe next year when it comes around again I'll add some more to it.

Thanks again.

[astronobob]

Very striking detail there Lee, you have done very well from what I can deduce from it and the chat ;) :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

[codemonkey]

Thanks Bob! :-)

[RobF]

Wow, I'd say you've got a beauty there! :thumbsup: :)

[DJT]

Fine image Lee. Nice to see you have that scope on the boil. I took a look at the full res on astrobin rather than the real res which was in your link and had a good hunt around amongst the myriad background galaxies. Much fun.

If there are warts, and most of us have them, sharing real res is very brave!

Well done.

[Ryderscope]

A very nice triplet indeed!
R

[codemonkey]

Thanks Rob :-)



Thanks David! :-) I thought the little background galaxy clusters warranted uploading the full res, even if it showed off all the warts. Glad you enjoyed it!



Thanks Rodney!

[codemonkey]

I've reprocessed this now: biggest change is I've fixed up those offending stars, though there's other changes as well including increased saturation on background galaxies. New version is on Astrobin (http://www.astrobin.com/217412/C/)

[RickS]

Nice repro, Lee. A quality image!

BTW, some good news about Astrobin. They are going to fix the handling of ICC colour profiles. The component they use that is responsible for stripping the profiles has been upgraded...

Cheers,
Rick.

[codemonkey]

Thanks Rick!

Ah, that's good news re Astrobin. I'm sure that's frustrated many.