NGC 1532 Tidal Tails

[furgle]

This is my first attempt at processing one of my data sets using PixInsight rather than Photoshop CC. It has been a ridiculously steep learning curve to get to the type of quality I was able to achieve with Photoshop, but I think I'm finally getting used to the process.

50 million light years away, NGC 1532 is slowly devouring one of its companion dwarf galaxies, NGC 1531. Large tidal tails from NGC 1532 are thrown outwards as the two galaxies interact. A number of other dwarf companion galaxies are also visible in the frame.

For higher resolution, click here (http://observatory.site/astrophotography/NGC_1532_Tidal_Tails/NGC_1532_Tidal_Tails_20171225.html)

**Image:**

* 91x 300s Luminance
* 18x 300s Red
* 13x 300s Green
* 14x 300s Blue

Total exposure 11 hours 20 minutes.

**Hardware:**

* Skywatcher Black Diamond 120ED
* Skywatcher EQ8 Pro mount
* QSI 683-ws8 Camera @ -15°C
* Astronomik Typ 2c Luminance, Deep Sky RGB filters
* Starlight Xpress Lodestar X2 Autoguider
* Innovations Foresight On Axis Guider
* Starlight Instruments Focus Boss II

**Location:**

* Orange zone in Brisbane, Australia. (Bortle 7)
* Imaged over 5 nights, new moon.


**Software:**

* Planning & camera alignment with Aladin 9
* Captured with AstroArt 6
* Guiding with PHD2 + PHD_Dither
* FocusLock live focusing
* CCDInspector: Image analysis & rejection
* CCDStack 2+: Calibrate, align, stack.
* Pixinsight 1.8: Crop, dynamic background extraction, deconvolution, TGV denoise, MMT denoise, MT star reduction, histogram stretch, local histogram enhancement, HDR multiscale transform, ATrous wavelet transform, linear fit RGB, background neutralisation, color calibration, SCNR, LRGB combination, saturation.

[Placidus]

A surprisingly difficult target nicely captured.

[Andy01]

Nice work!
As a dedicated PS user, did you think Pixinsight did a better job of processing the data?

Cheers

Andy

[furgle]

I think once I practiced a few times, yes it did handle the data better. I spent nearly a month playing with various older stacks before I had a go at this one.

I resisted the urge to use PS as much as possible. There were various points where I was very tempted to save a tiff, do something in PS and then import the result back into PI. This photo is all PI except for the title, and a tiny bit of selective color to remove saturated magenta from some of the stars.

[RickS]

Looks like you have a good handle on PI now. That's a nice result.



Try the ColorMask script and CurvesTransformation. I originally wrote the script so that Bob Franke's "gold/turquoise" process for tweaking narrowband colour could be done in PI more easily. It's very useful for most types of colour manipulation.

Cheers,
Rick.

[joelshort]

That's a great image. I'm jealous!
In my experience PI will handle your data better than PS but it is a very steep learning curve. I was a PS user and making the switch was painful, but I'm glad I did it.

[Camelopardalis]

Beautiful Adam :thumbsup:

[Atmos]

Very nice Adam, showing what can be achieved with a mere doublet!