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Mike and Rolf,
As mentioned, I emailed the URL of your combined image to Ken Freeman and several other professional astronomers.
Dr Freeman (of ANU), at least, has replied to me regarding your image, as he is interested in just about every aspect of stellar and Milky Way and extragalactic astronomy.
(most other professionals will ignore you if your email is not directly relevant to their "project of the month")
It was just a very brief reply, indicating that the structures seen in your image may be of additional interest to him, especially as a comparison with his paper presenting an image of Cen A which was made with Adaptive Histogram Equalization.
Incidentally, a galaxy image has to contain some very unusual structure in order to get some serious interest from Dr Freeman......because he knows a lot more about galaxies than the average extragalactic astronomer.
The concern amongst the professionals, regarding your combined image, would probably be something like, 'Is it reproducible from the raw data using some logical process, how was it derived, and are there any artefacts in it?" However, I would have to say that the professionals are not above resorting to "ad hoc" image processing techniques in order to bring out detail in galaxy images.
Most of the people I sent the email to are studying the orbits of planetary nebulae and globular clusters which orbit around NGC 5128, so as to figure out how this galaxy evolved.
On the other hand, Dr Freeman, in the paper I mentioned, modelled the light distribution in an image of N5128.
He has also written a really cool paper on NGC 1316 showing that its outer regions seem to be forming a disk structure (in other words, NGC 1316 may end up looking like the Sombrero).
Best Regards,
Robert
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