[Andy01 (Andy)]

Originally Posted by Ryderscope

Fine work Andy. In lieu of on octopus I see a strange fish with a blue eye and a knobby jaw

Ha ha, Pareidolia rules again!

Originally Posted by Bart

Very nice Andy, lovely rich colour and golden stars!
Nearly as good as mine!

Cheers Bart, perhaps one day I'll get up to your image standards

Originally Posted by pkinchington

Good one Andy. I am trying to get some blue back into my eta carina shot - Your blue looks great.

Cheers Peter

Cheers Peter, was not easy but I got there eventually!

Originally Posted by marc4darkskies

Ah yes, nice! That looks much better Andy! The detail definitely pops more now so the image as a whole is much more compelling! There's no doubt that when incorporating Ha as luminance, it's very tricky to get the best from both the Lum and the Ha data without one swamping the other. My version was straight LRGB so it was much easier to process.

BTW, anyone who skips doing Lum for a colour image - even under dark skies - is mad unless their camera is one of those magical ones which doesn't produce any dark current & readout noise!

One tip I'd also share more generally is look at your master stack for each channel separately. Properly aligned you can blink between them to see where your colour & luminance detail is coming from. EG: If you see good blue signal somewhere that's not in your processed colour image then you know you've done something wrong and you need to either find the error or work the blue data back in (probably via masking).

Anyway, I'm starting to ramble. Thanks for taking my critiques in the spirit they're given - trying to help!

Thanks again Marcus, appreciate the constructive critique

Originally Posted by Peter Ward

I have nothing meaningful to add, that has not been mentioned by other AP Sensei like Marcus.

It's a very good rendition. Nice one

Thanks Peter n- perhaps I should have entered it in the Malins, all my entries bombed this year!