Centaurus A Some colour added

[Hagar]

Centaurus A LRGB captured with QHY9 Mono CCD and Custom Scientific Filters and Tak FS102 APO.

L= 80min RGB = 40 min each colour.

Stacked and combined in IP3 and stretched in PS CS3.

I have included a crop of the Galaxy also.

[Craig_L]

Good one Doug. Got that QHY9 humming.

[Deeno]

Mighty fine....

[multiweb]

Yeah very nice. Well done. :thumbsup:

[Hagar]

Thanks Guys. Not as good as I had hoped for but my processing skills still need quite a bit of work.

[avandonk]

Hagar could I humbly suggest try streching each colour and luminance fits individually in IP with the digital development thingy. The best black and white appearance is a good guide. Then recombine in IP to get a colour tiff. I have found stretching works far better in fits form even with the Canon colour data. I thnk what is happening in the case of the Canon colour data is that information is lost with the interpolation step from fits to tiff. I am sure that subtle colour is lost by stretching in a colour tiff rather than as a fit. The fit images contain all your original data essentially uncorrupted by recombining.

I have been doing this for a few years and the more I do the more I learn and get better. I still have a long way to go.

Hope this helps. Bert

Do the stretching to the luminance first for the best looking B&W image, and then use the same parameters for RGB before recombining.

[Hagar]

Hi Bert. I actually do most of my processing with the FITs files and find a certain improveent by doing so. The one thing I usually don't do is a DDP stretch in IP and leave the curve and linear stretch until I take the image into PS. I have not had any real success with the IP DDP.
I have been experimenting quite a lot with difereing combination methods and colour balance methods but have at this stage yet to satisfy myself that the outcome is worth the changes to my normal work profile.

This image is not the best for me to play with as the RGB data has horrific gradients due to the quite large moon and its proximity to CA.

If I can get a clear night without a moon I may be able to capture some good data that gives me some thing to truely experiment with.

Thanks for the comments and advice.