Quote:
Originally Posted by strongmanmike
Well Richard it has been 6 years now since my 3 consecutive night 20hr effort under perfect dark skies on this galaxy through a 6" telescope and I remember when I was processing what was then unique looking data, the excitement was palpable...I imagine it was very similar in your case here too, so I feel your emotion  . Having lots of data to work with (particularly if captured under truly dark skies) is indeed a pleasure to work with.
Congratulations of a fine image with modest equipment, I can see the full hockey stick shape but the galactic Cirrus is a bit hard to really make out  but one good thing is that you don't look to have simply arbitrarily lassoed the hockey stick shape or used a heavy handed mask and worked on it separately, so it looks natural and to be real scaled data.
So...as many on here will remember I made a reasonable number of reprocessing efforts on my data set and started to annoy some on here with my regular reposts of Centaurus A's  ...but in the end the final finished product (4 months later) was worth the many efforts..and the term doing a Sidonio or Sidononioing was coined for reprocessing  Hey I can take it  .
So, see if you can reveal the cirrus a bit better, perhaps up the contrast a bit and try processing a version just for the dust lane and (very) carefully blend it back in...
Again great effort and commendable result there 
Mike |
Thanks Mike. It has been a bit of a rollacoster last week, as I (in the process of acquiring this image data) have also been testing and refining my automation software (Sequence Generator Pro) - so testing out unsupervised plate solving, auto focus and auto-meridian flips. I lost quite a bit of data due to equipment issues, but very excited to still have cracked the "20 hour" barrier.
Bringing out the galactic cirrus has been interesting. Using your image and Rolf's image as references, I can easily see the galactic cirrus in my data with an extreme stretch. However - i guess due to the fact that my camera is operating at > ambient temps - there is a LOT of noise when I do this. I simply cant reproduce the smooth result that you had with such an extreme stretch, but i guess that is in part due to the difference in capability of the equipment. Given the modest nature of my gear i am very happy with the result, but will continue to refine as you have suggested. I admit that after viewing the image on 4 different screens (two desktop monitors, a laptop and my phone) the "galactic cirrus" is indeed hard to see. Pixinsight does not allow one to selectively lasso a region of the image, which i think preserves the integrity of the data. Nevertheless you've given me something to work towards.
