Hi
I've been having big fun with the new SBIG and decided to have a go at a galaxy shot (M83 of course). I went for broke and the with the auto guiding gods smiling on me (it all worked for once inc goto's), I bagged 70 mins of M83 (7x10mins at -29c). This is the first time I got more than an hour of anything so naturally I thought it would be great.
I had of course forgotten that I am cr#p at processing galaxies.
Its a bigger image (cropped) so I've left it at
www.dancalleja.com. Very unhappy. I've also left the uncropped version
It has a cast that I cant get rid of but more irritating is a background of 'sand' that I can't seem to process out. I've seen this before in my galaxy imaging and cant seem to overcome it. My workflow is:
CCSDtack
Convert to colour; register and normalise; remove hot pixels; combine median; convert to tiff; process in CS3.
CS3
Three curve stretches; colour range and background gaussian blur; some noise removal; some saturation tweaking.
I'd appreciate any tips from the galaxy imaging gods!