Quote:
Originally Posted by marc4darkskies
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 |
Ahhh the high pass iterative approach I see, that makes sense actually.
At 100% res it was pretty obvious you had done something, I wasn't sure it was the decon layering technique but had to ask... I didn't think of the good'ol high pass filter. Overall it just didn't look natural...however shrunk to 50% the second version looks much better, although the dynamic range is definitely flattened a tad.
Of course you also must remember, I have been staring at this area of sky on my screen for over a week now too, so my minds eye is a little influenced
It's looking great Marcus, great field of view, I'm just musing over the details. I admire your work so much that when I see something I am not expecting I probably just notice it more than anyone else, besides when you post at 100%, as you say, we notice warts and all
Bring on the colour
Mike