Ghost of Jupiter

[Kal (Andrew)]

I borrowed a friends colour filters to try on my DSI pro - with mixed results. Taking and processing the seperate monochrome channels I knew what to do, but I'm pretty clueless on how to combine the 3 mono pictures into a single colour pic

Google search pointed me to Maxim DL but it costs half a grand $US......there has to be something out there free that I can use if some good samaritan will point me to

Anyway, here is the pic. Not the best effort but an educational experience nonetheless.

[tornado33]

Nothing wrong with that one, the colours look great, thats the correct colour for that nebula
Scott

[Kal (Andrew)]

Maybe I should add that the process I took seemed to take about 68 confusing steps to do the one simple task I'm sure I was doing it all wrong.....I had to split my 3 mono pictures into 3 colour channels each (9 images) just so I could select one of each to combine

[Ric]

Hi Kal, that's a very nice image. You have captured it nicely.
Maxim also offers a 30 day free trial but it's the full version so the download is about 26Mb.

Cheers

[Garyh]

Hey!, that looks really good to me!!! Be very hard to improve on..

[RB (Andrew)]

Wow very nice, that's very impressive Andrew !

[Kal (Andrew)]

Thanks for the support guys. It was actually the trial version of maxim DL that I used to combine the pics. Maybe I did something wrong when capturing (saving the mono pictures as a 24 bit color image?) which made post processing more difficult to comprehend. Meade autostarsuite has a function to combine R G and B into a single color pic but I couldn't get it to work - I think it may have been because I stacked the images first in deepskystacker and then the meade software wouldn't recognise the file format that I had saved it as causing the loaded files to look corrupt. I will play around with it more today and see if I can improve on what I have.

Here are a couple of other mono pictures that I took last night as well. In the NGC 2438 image you can just see the central mag 17.5 star. The second pic is the popular 47Tucanae.

[Dr Nick (Nick)]

Exellent!
Do you have photoshop?
If so, follow this tutorial I made to guide you through the process of stacking the colour layers.

[atalas]

Very nice detail!

[netwolf]

Andrew, you know thats my most favourite target. I just have had a hint of it visually. Will need to take the dob out one night and take a squiz at it. You have done very well geting the details there. Try Stellar Magic there is freeware version of it. Image Plus or AstroArt are the cheaper alternatives to Maxim.

Regards

[Kal (Andrew)]

Nick - I have photoshop but using layers does my brain in! I think I need to really sit down and use a proper tutorial because by the looks of it I could most definately do what I need to do in photoshop - rotating each of the 3 images (removing field rotation) and combining the 3 images. Sometimes I feel like a complete novice while using photoshop

Fahim - thanks for the alternate software suggestions. I downloaded and tried stellar magic, at the price of *free* it is in my price range It does the RGB stack and align very well, however it doesn't remove field rotation so I would have to figure out how to do that manually if I use that software.

I think my best bet is getting to know layers in photoshop in depth, I just need to invest some time in learning it all!