M42 region mosaic

[DiscoDuck]

My first ever mosaic - at least one with more than just two frames.

Not such a large region covered for a mosaic, as with a GSO RC8 and a QHY8, my field of view is fairly narrow.

Couple that with a few dumb errors in orienting and positioning the field of view between sessions due to poor planning, and what's left is only 18M pixels shown out of 36M taken with 6 frames over 5 different sessions in December and January. (e.g. one frame was just to fill in a tiny sliver missed between two other frames!!)

All 20 minute exposures. I think 57 of them in total spread across the 6 frames. Put together in PixInsight and then processed in PI + some Photoshop.

Full res available on Astrobin here (http://www.astrobin.com/full/236264/0/).

Looking at it at 100%, I've definitely oversharpened the proverbial out of the dust lanes in the middle. However, viewed at a reasonable size, it looks ok. Wasn't sure what was best to do here. In the end, I went for what looks good for the image viewed so it fits full screen - and to anyone who views it at 100% I apologise :ashamed: . Advice appreciated.

Thanks for looking.

Paul

[batema]

I think that is a great mosaic. Very seemless and colours look great.

[IanP]

Good shot, Paul :thumbsup:

The core seems to be a little bit overblown, I’d try HDRMultiscaleTransform with Range+StarMask.
If you want to quickly try without mask, start with 6 layers, and check ToLightness and Deringering ..
:hi:

[astronobob]

Looks you have blended the frames together nicely Paul, , the whole image has good color and depth too.
The 100% scaled imaged is showing the same stuff I have produced at times, recollecting I had de-noised a lot more than necessary and when came time to sharpen, there wasn't a good amount of detail left to sharpen, Lol

Not sure if this corresponds tho,, just looks similar ?
I do like your image at full screen level tho, real nice job there :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

[DiscoDuck]

Thanks.



Thanks.



I merged in a stack of a few 60 second shots to try to mitigate the core brightness, but, yes, I agree it still seems a bit much. I might try the HDRMultiscale you suggest on those 60 second shots before merging. Trying it after the merge seemed to lead to an awful mess.



Thanks. I take no credit though. It was the GradientMerge tool in PixInsight - and a nice tutorial I found somewhere on how to use it well for more than two frames, which was puzzling me. The trick seemed to be to do it a rough one with the old (StarAlignment) tool and then use that to align the images for the new tool!



Yes, another member has suggested offline it could be worth a bit more gentle reprocess. I might give that a go.

[John K]

That's awesome - really like the colour and the sharpened dust lanes which in fact create a real 3D feel.

As others have said, if you reduce the intensity of the core it could be a different interpretation, but I really like it even with the core like that as the sharpened lanes create depth, including the star spikes which once again create a galactic 3D feel.

[DiscoDuck]

Thanks John.

Actually, just uploaded a new version with the 60 second images merged into the core HDRd beforehand. Not sure which I prefer. (Also went a tad less maniacal on the sharpening!).

http://www.astrobin.com/236264/B/