Hi All,
Difficult to collect much data these days due to the weather. However I'm not limited to clear sky weekends operating gear remotely so I'll take clear skies when ever I get them - as scarce as they are of late. It seems I'm not alone reading other posts here on IIS. I managed to complete the project over the course of Oct/Nov collecting the final data sets needed. I've been eager to image this target for sometime given the first mosaic attempt was of its smaller relation, the
Small Magellanic Cloud.
So here's my rendition of the
Large Magellanic Cloud
Warning: larger resolutions may take time to load.
LRGB composite, four panel mosaic, one too many hours processing, t'was a processing challenge. Gradients due to an error on my part, left the computer monitor on in the obs and its one of the only items not remote power switched so couldn't turn it off. Doh!
I reshot much of the green filtered data, but still attempted to work with what I had. I'm not one to waste photons where possible.
The objective of this image was to display the scene in as true colour as possible (G2V referenced). Its extremely tempting to go all out with Ha data and try to bring back the colour shift, but I settled for luminance data alone and even then I only used it to reduce aspects of noise in the dim faint regions. Really the RGB data is what shined through in this data set. With no contrasty Ha, the delicate teal OIII in various regions of the image can be seen. Also rich star colours express the star burst regions with subtle dust across the galaxy's irrgular bar shape. I found it interesting that at first glance the tarantula looks highlight clipped.
Panel stitching is rough in part due to the colour gradients. I think I could have spent more time on it along with time on planning a little better as panel rotation did hinder the alignment. Though not enough to to make a considerable impact on the end result - just lost some sky real-estate but with the big chip of the Apogee U16M it matters not. Full size image has been reduced by to make it web friendly. 1:1 image I expect will make a good print. Moving on to other projects so this will do for now.
Hope you enjoy the swim around the scene.
All comments welcome.
