[Placidus (Mike and Trish)]

Originally Posted by Atmos

The galaxy appears a bit more defined now, the extra data has certainly helped, especially with some of the stars along the right side of the image. The background is a lot nicer, especially around the brighter areas and the background galaxies are showing by better and pop out more.

What I do prefer from the original is the stars. They are a lot softer, have a far gentler fall off. They are more distracting in the newer one, sharpening? I have given up sharpening my images because it tends to leave the stars with a bright core and then a hard fall off.

The extra data has helped

Edit: On review, not sharpening, they're just a fair bit brighter over the original

Thanks for your close and accurate inspection, Colin. I agree with your sentiments. I'm finding a global sharpening can produce nasty sequin-like stars, and am trying to avoid that. My goal was to just brighten the numerous extremely distant galaxies which were too gritty to see before, but are now plausibly there.

I produced two versions of the image. The first was optimized for the main galaxy details, strongly sharpened, which showed the details of the main galaxy nicely but had very ugly stars. The second version was optimized for the background and extremely distant galaxies: wavelet filtered, brightened, but not sharpened.

I then combined the two images according to the 150 pixel low pass filtered regional brightness, thus getting the sharp version in the galaxy core, the bright smooth version in the background, and pro rata in between. (This is analogous to using two layers and a mask in PhotoShop).

The vast majority of stars got brightened a lot and sharpened a tiny bit.

Agreed that the stars do look a tad intrusive now, but attempts to use a more conventional star mask produced nasty transition zones, and I was reasonably happy with the current version, which I think achieved the goal of showing the distant fuzzies better than before.

Perhaps one could mount an argument that distant galaxies are not the point of the image, and should be sacrificed, but my motivation was that I was really rather surprised to see any at all, given that we're in full-on Milky Way here, and so I wanted to show them.

Thanks again for looking so closely, and again, you are right, and I broadly agree with you.

Very best,
Mike