[marc4darkskies (Marcus)]

Originally Posted by RickC

Hi Marcus,
very nice detail in that image, it's good just to get something on the screen considering the weather.
Richard

Thanks Rick and here here - anything's better than nothing!! One of the reasons I chose Eta (almost reluctantly) was because it's so bright I should be able to gather the data very quickly. All I need is another 3 hours to finish it!

Originally Posted by SkyViking

That's indeed a great image with loads of detail. Well done.
Looking forward to the colour version, that'll be spectacular!

Cheers Rolf - glad you liked it. It will be better when there's some colour though!

Originally Posted by strongmanmike

Hi Marcus

Wow pretty detailed mate, enough little bits in there to keep a 5 year old busy for hours .

I see what Marc is saying, it does look a little forced at the moment too although the updated version is an improvement, as you say, a work in progress though.

Did you use some multi strength decon on this?

I think as an exercise in seeing how much detail you can pull out it's rather revealing but for the coloured version I would love to see a more natural result.....ahh, if that's ok?..and have it on my desk for marking by 9am..ok?

Mike

Hey Mike - thanks mate! I appreciate the comments and feedback! And there's enough detail in there to keep a 50 something person enthralled for 15 minutes!

There was no large effort to render crisp detail. Being such a bright object I had tonnes of Ha signal and the detail was smacking me in the face! Remember also, I'm using a Tak so given the right seeing conditions, sharp images are par for the course . At F5.5 especially, crisp images are dead easy to produce - no "forcing" was required!

No decon at all is involved here. Decon and MSDLB in particular should only be applied when you're imaging at small image scales and to mitigate the effects of seeing. In this case, I imaged at 2.21 arcsec per pixel (quite a large image scale) and the seeing was good so most of that seeing was hidden by the image scale. I.e. in these circumstances, when your average FWHM is around 2.5 pixels to start with, there's no point doing decon. In fact, applying it under these circumstances will simply add artefacts to an image and make it looked overcooked. Also, I only apply MSDLB (that by definition produces halo artefacts) to galaxy shots that I shoot at 1 arcsec per pixel. I apply it very sparlingly too - applying it using selective masking - never to a whole frame.

In this image I've applied iterative high pass filtering to the whole frame to increase contrast and make the detail pop. Only about 33% of that was applied. This is the only "sharpening" that's been done. BTW, the trick with iterative high passing is to select your pixel radii correctly - eg too small and you risk overdoing the contrast in the small scale structure. As to the "natural" look, well, that's way to subjective for me, but I will be reviewing the overall contrast of the image when I add the colour. Right now though it looks fine to me .

Cheers, Marcus