[RickS (Rick)]

Originally Posted by tilbrook@rbe.ne

Hi Rick,

That's a really nice job you've done, it looks natural , great colour and heaps of detail.

I'd hang that on on the wall !!

Cheers,

Justin.

Thanks, Justin.

Originally Posted by strongmanmike

Very nice image of this beautiful galaxy!

Mike

Very kind of you, Mike.

Originally Posted by ozstronomer

Nice image Rick, looks like you had a good imaging run. Well Done

Thanks, Geoff. It was nice to have two days of dark skies,and especially good not to have to set up again on the second night!

Originally Posted by gregbradley

A nice image Rick and a great shot for a first image of a galaxy. NGC6744 is a bit of a toughy and is quite faint.
Its also hard to get a nice colour balance with this one compared to other targets.

So a couple of pointers;

Firstly star sizes seem a little large. Did you use deconvolution on the luminance?

Also see Ken Crawford's tutorial on multiple deconvolution. It can extract more detail which is the name of the game in galaxies.

3rdly the galaxy is bluish with a yellowish core. Your galaxy looks a little grey. Also stars are lacking in colour. So colour can be boosted here.
Selective colour tool is good for boosting individual colours and shades.

Also see free Photoshop plug ins from Neil Fleming for boosing colour saturation and dust in galaxy images.

Cheers,

Greg.

Thanks, Greg. I didn't do a deconvolution. My previous attempts haven't been that successful, but I think it's time to get serious and get out the whip and chair

I used a PI shortcut for colour calibration and it looks like it didn't work this time. I also tried my usual G2V calibrated extinction factors and that didn't look quite right either. Perhaps I just need to tweak the colours to look like other images of 6744?

Thanks very much for the pointers.

Originally Posted by naskies

Nice work, Rick. Glad to see you have your mono camera working properly How do you find the GSO RC10?

It looks like you may have plenty of head room to boost the contrast over the background star field (i.e. curves adjustment). I think there may be a slight blue/green colour cast?

Thanks, Dave. I actually had a different problem with the camera. The cooling was a bit flaky. Fortunately, dithering and stacking got rid of the additional noise. I also found out what was causing the previous dust problem. The shutter coating used on early versions of the H-18 falls off.

I'm quite pleased with the RC10 so far. For the price it's hard to beat. It takes some time to sort out imaging at 2000mm but I think I'm getting the hang of it.

Thanks for your suggestions!

Cheers,
Rick.