[multiweb (Marc)]

Originally Posted by Tom Davis

Great job! That's a wonderful mosaic!!

Tom

Thanks Tom - Glad you like it.

Originally Posted by troypiggo

That's awesome!

Thanks mate.

Originally Posted by gregbradley

Overall a great image Marc. A couple of points that may help.

There is evidence of oversharpening. Some stars look very harsh and the dim areas in the top right for example are rippled with sharpening artifacts.

If you have it with software you can get sharpish stars without the unsharp mask harshness by using deconvolution. Again its trial and error but you don't want to push it too hard. You can also lasso dim areas and use gaussian blur or use the blur tool and rub over the affected areas to smooth them out. If you want to make stars smaller you can select out the stars using colour range tool and then use a small amount of minimum filter. Again, in small doses.

I am personally not a fan of unsharp mask. Smart sharpen in Photoshop seems to do a better job. Often unsharp mask makes stars that may already be distracting from the main object even brighter and more distracting.

You also have some coma in your system. Are you using a coma corrector? Is it set to the correct distance? Correctors like flatteners are designed to operate at a fairly exact distance from the camera chip to the last metal edge of the corrector (metal back distance). This varies with different cameras and correctors.

Nice image with lots of detail.

Greg.

Thanks Greg. yeah I might have got a bit heavy on the contrast but I didn't sharpen anything though. I used the shadow highlight tool to tweak the contrast a bit. I used one run of noise reduction. Ha pics always come very sharp. I know about the coma. I can live with it. I think my MPCC is off by 2-3mm but I can't do much about it. Unless I can find an adjustable/telescopic spacer with a lock nut? Like an helicoidal focuser system. You wouldn't happen to have something like that in your bag of tricks by any chance would you?