[rmuhlack (Richard)]

Thanks to those who have commented for the positive feedback.

Since I started astrophotography back in 2012-2013 this has been one of my all time favourite targets , having been inspired by benchmark deep images of the time including Mike Sidonio's widefield from 2009 and of course Rolf Olsen's iconic 120 hour version from 2014. Rolf in particular has made several updates to his image, most notably his incredible new 321 hour starless version (where every remaining background light source is either a galaxy or quasar). Earlier this year Rolf gave a presentation to the Astronomical Society of South Australia where he talked us through this project - and this primarily was the inspiration to produce a composite of all my previous data to see what detail I could reveal with some serious integration time, albeit with only OSC camera data.

In response to a couple of comments:

Originally Posted by pmrid

I see your image/s have captured part of the jet stream - an elusive target at best. Well done.

Thanks Peter. The possibility of revealing that (very dim) Ha relativistic jet was one of the goals of this new effort. Its obviously there now in this image, but further time with a narrowband Ha filter and mono camera (and likely some further processing tweaks) would probably be needed from here to show it more clearly.

Originally Posted by gregbradley

A tremendous effort and fabulous image. It shows the value of keeping your archival data.

Greg.

Thanks Greg, I agree. To be honest I never thought I would be going back to that old DSLR data but here we are. I've recently upgraded my data storage now too (a 4 bay NAS with 4x16TB drives) so that historic data is far more convenient to access now should the need arise.

Originally Posted by xiongz

That's great efforts, thanks for sharing. What are these ripples of lights which would be interesting if confirmed. I tried to combine data together sometimes as I had imaged some targets using various cameras and scopes as I upgraded bit by bit over the years. A lot of times I found that lots of these earlier data weren't very much useful. But again I was only using Photoshop processing them.

John

Thanks John. Those "ripples" are related to the outer shell-like structure of Centaurus A and are definitely real (Rolf's images I linked to above show those structures quite clearly). I'm using PixInsight which has a number of processes that are helpful for teasing out this sort of image detail.