NEW 2 June 2017
We've now doubled the exposure. 16 hours of Lum, and 5 hours per channel of RGB, for a total of 31 hours observing time.
New full size image here. Of course doubling the exposure produces only incremental rather than game-changing improvements, we think it is better.
The background is now much less gritty. We've processed it to bring out the very faintest details in the faint lobe toward ten o'clock or so, at the expense of overall punch.
In the outermost extensions of the relativistic jet, you can see a wide and diffuse super-faint red jet with much brighter and sharper, but still faint discrete blue blobs and arcs.
Although the absolute colours are somewhat arbitrary, we can see that the outer halo is relatively pink, indicating older cooler stars, and the inner core relatively blue, indicating hot young stars. We've not done anything naughty or selective to produce that differential effect.
We've been very careful to produce as much contrast as we can in the meat pattie without burning anything to black. There is now more dark detail in the very darkest dust lanes in the meat pattie.
The distant background galaxies are a little clear and more definite now.
In a separate exercise, we've shot 7 hours of H-alpha. This has proven so ridiculously faint that, sadly, it has not been possible to combine it with this LRGB image, and we will publish it separately. However, it confirms all the features in the outer jet that we've described here: a broad fat H-alpha stripe with tiny, discrete sharper streaks and dots and arcs that here show up as blue.
Best,
M & T