My first M33

[Ant0nio]

I've been waiting for this object to come around again after missing it last season. A combination of exposures using two different scopes;
ED127 @ F6, 16x600sec
FLT98 @ F5, 18x600sec
SBIG 8300C OSC acquired & stacked with Nebulosity IV & finished in Photoshop CS2 with the help of Noel Carboni's action set.
Guiding with PHD. I found M33 to be a rewarding target to image compared to smaller Galaxies.
I tried to keep the image a bit larger this time but it suffered a bit with the conversion to Jpeg.
Comments welcome & thanks for looking,
Cheers,
Tony

[xelasnave]

Excellent result Tony.
How do you combine images from two scopes?
Alex

[RyanJones]

What a beautiful image Tony well done. You’ve processed it beautifully too. Great level of colour with nice soft dust lanes. Love it :thumbsup:

[Ant0nio]

Hi Alex, thank you for your feedback. I use Nebulosity IV for pre processing & stacking, in the alignment stage there is an option to choose "translation+rotation+scale",
next step is to choose your alignment stars & save each frame & then stack the aligned & scaled frames.
This may be possible with other stacking software, someone here may know. Hope this helps. Cheers,
Tony



:thanx: Ryan, I'm so glad you liked the result. It seems as though we have similar expectations with processing. This was the 5th iteration to get the dust lanes to fit your description.
I ended up using "enhance DSO & reduce stars" in Carboni's action set (the best $25 I've spent on software) to achieve the result.
1 layer of soft light & luminosity @ 90% were added after noise reduction to enhance colour. Cheers,
Tony

[RyanJones]

I bought Carboni’s action set too. I didn’t end up using it much but what I did do was run some of the actions and follow the process to get s greater understanding of Photoshop and what does what and how. I then fine tuned things to suit my particular image. An easy way to “ enhance your DSO and reduce stars “ is to use the minimum tool. You have to be careful though because it has a tendency to clump details if you use it too much. You need to make sure it’s selected on “ maintain roundness “ then zoom into a part of the DSO that has some brighter nebulosity with some darkness in the frame. I tend to work between 0.2 and 0.7 pixels. Basically you just gently move up until you can see clumping appear then back down .1 or .2 pixels. Because it works on the highlights of the image it can be good to soften the overly bright features in the cores of some Nebula too.

[Startrek]

Great image Tony
Well framed and processed
Plenty of detail too
Well done !

[LostInSp_ce]

A very naturalistic representation and a fantastic effort for your first time. Well done!

[Ant0nio]

Thanks for the positive feedback guys, I'm glad you liked it :thumbsup:
Cheers,
Tony