NGC 4945 and companion

[Enrique]

70 frames of 10 minutes each. Total exposure time: 10 h
Scope: RCX400 14” at F5.
Camera: QHY8
Guiding: QHY5 and PHD
Processing: DSS and Photoshop


Thanks for your comments. I reprocessed the picture. Please tell me what you think,

Thanks,

enrique

[Lester]

Hi Enrique, thanks for the very nice detailed view of NGC 4945.

All the best.

[jjjnettie]

Wow! A massive effort.
Thanks for sharing it with us.

[TrevorW]

Hi Enrique very nice indeed although sky background does not look natural to me a tad too black IMO but the galaxies have been processed well

[Enrique]

Thank you for your comments. The black point was a little low. I increased it. It came up much better I think,

Thanks for looking,

Enrique

[iceman]

Nice work Enrique, plenty of detail in the galaxy.

The stars have lost all their colour though and look unnatural.

Massive effort capturing the data, i'm sure you'll revisit the processing many times!

[gregbradley]

Impressive image. It shows more detail in the galaxy than I have seen before. As pointed out it would be good if the star colours can be extracted. They may have been bleached out at some early stage of the processing. Perhaps too much DDP stretching if you did that. Its better to use levels and curves than DDP as you have more control. Keep the last 25% or so the curve straight so it doesn't blow out the highlights which is what may have bleached your stars.

What sort of reducer did you use? You don't have any coma and that's a relatively large chip in the QHY8 - DSLR sized right?

Greg.

[Enrique]

Greg:

I am using a pseudo luminance layer for sharpening. It had a problem that bleached the stars.

I am using a Lumicon Giant Eazy Guider. It has a little bit of chromatic aberration but it works quite well.

The picture was reprocessed, please have a look

Enrique

[mental4astro]

Mate, the first thing that I gasped when I saw the image was "Holy crap"!:eyepop:

Stunning!

This one took my breath away! Excellent work.

[iceman]

Much better, Enrique. There's some jpeg compression artifacts but the colours are better.

Nice work.

[marc4darkskies]

Lovely image Enrique! :thumbsup: Maybe a slight green cast you could remove but the colours in the galaxy are great!

Cheers, Marcus

[spearo]

Looks good!
well done
frank