[marc4darkskies (Marcus)]

Originally Posted by strongmanmike

..
He, he, you asked for that naaah, early days I can tell but t'is lookin purdy good Marcus, bout what I was expecting from your big bad Italian boy

You are a bit of a master at using that dreaded decon that almost everyone else struggles with (including me)....must get some lessons from you some time!

Mike

Thanks Mike. Here is lesson number 1. Light decon only especially if applying to the whole frame. It is quite simple really - too many people go too hard from the get-go but if your optics and seeing are both good, things really only need to be "crisped up". Lesson 2: Selectively layer increasingly heavy decon levels onto high signal areas only - carefully. I haven't done MSDLB (Multistrength decon layer blending) lately but I know it works. I tend to use PS sharpening routines on high signal areas these days - again, very gently.

Originally Posted by Leonardo70

Wonderful Marcus !!

All the best,
Leo

Thank you Leo

Originally Posted by Peter Ward

OK.

You get the Oscar for NGC 1365

Suffice to say: galaxies like focal length and aperture.


but
67%?
what were you thinking????

Cheers Peter - Me? 67%? Never!!! When you get that new 16" Alluna I'll ask, nay, I'll demand that you post full res images!!

Originally Posted by gregbradley

A fabulous image Marcus but have to mention a lot of the stars look elongated and eggy. Some look very round and some look like the halo is eggy but the core is less so. What is causing that?

Greg.

Thanks Greg. I'm not sure where you're looking but bear in mind this is indeed a quick & dirty that will be discarded when I get more data. I just wanted to see (and show off) the detail I'm achieving with this wonderful scope. Dare I say, I'll leave the 300% star roundness check until I'm doing the final processing on a full set of data! That said there may be stacking issues or faulty / overdone processing steps in play here. I've also noticed minor imaging train flexure issues after crossing the meridian that are just enough to cause sub pixel stacking problems which manifest as elongation in the combined image. That's one of the reasons I bought PI - to use it's star stacking capabilities to remove slight mismatches with deformation (not used in this quick process - I just used vanila CCDStack)

Originally Posted by Warhen

Wonderful Marcus- one of my very favorite galaxies. Would love to work with f.l. like this! Looks great.

Cheers Warren! All hail focal length!

Originally Posted by RickS

Great stuff, Marcus. Hurry up with the colour version

Thanks Rick! I will sacrifice a chicken to the weather gods tonight

Originally Posted by lazjen

Looks good so far and I look forward to seeing more of it in the future.

Thanks Chris - me too!

Originally Posted by multiweb

Terrific details in the core and dust lanes. Very cool. Final is gonna be epic.

Thanks Marc! I'll try not to dissappoint!

Originally Posted by Stevec35

Looks good Marcus. The detail in the centre is incredible.

Cheers

Steve

Cheers Steve! I've compared to a couple of benchmarks (Gendler and Pugh) and I'm still grinning! Just too much noise at the moment.