[Placidus (Mike and Trish)]

Thanks muchly Rick, Marcus, Allan, Steve, Kevin, Bill,

Originally Posted by Peter Ward

I can't help but think something is amiss here...an almost Hubblesque pre-servicing SA light spill pervades the field....as to the cause ?

Originally Posted by marc4darkskies

Fantastic depth M&T! I suspect though that your seeing wasn't optimal for this data either(?) There is a fuzziness about the stars - which Peter perceived initially. It's a relatively minor point compared to the grandeur of the full frame, but some more processing would tighten things up. Can't wait to see the colour version!

Thought long and hard about this, and think I have some feel for what's going on. The image is pretty deep - in the sense of lowish noise and longish exposure - and I was able to process to show very faint features, but that meant using an arcsinh stretch with a slope at the origin around 400:1. That (combined with affordable optics and ordinary seeing) is what is causing the stars to look kleenex-soft and fluffy. Marcus's excellent NGC 7424 is showing a similar effect in the stars, for what I suspect is the same reason - Marcus has shown some very faint features in the galaxy and that takes a lot of stretch. In our shot, the sin is compounded by trying to show those five tiny star-forming regions in the central nucleus, rather than letting them burn out to a single clump. The result is to reduce the mid-range contrast. I reprocessed it more conventionally without the super-faint stuff and with the middle burned out, and the stars look fine. Not sure that I can achieve the effect I want without fluffy stars and low contrast. Peter's Alluna scope might be able to do it, as it does seem intrinsically extremely sharp, but one would have to do the actual experiment.