Antennae

[codemonkey (Lee)]

Ok, finally got around to reprocessing this one. I had planned to get new RGB as the data was dodgy, but I've decided to move onto other things.

I think this is an improvement on noise levels, colour and stars, although the stars still aren't great due to dodgy RGB.

New version attached to original post, full res on Astrobin.

[Atmos (Colin)]

That is really nice Lee
Question though, there are a lot of grey stars, is that due to not having the colour depth (RGB data) or something else?

[Slawomir (Suavi)]

I really like the new revision Lee. A definite improvement over the previous versions - colours are much nicer than Version A and stretching histogram further (on top of a few other Jedi mind tricks in PI) resulted in a beautiful photograph.

[codemonkey (Lee)]

Originally Posted by Atmos

That is really nice Lee
Question though, there are a lot of grey stars, is that due to not having the colour depth (RGB data) or something else?

Cheers mate! There's a couple of things at play there.

#1 I used a mask to push the vibrance/saturation on the galaxy and did this much more heavily on the galaxy than I did on the stars/background.

#2 The RGB data isn't nice... the star shapes between red and blue in particular are very different. For some reason, even with good guiding I've found now that I seem to get very high eccentricity when binning 2x2 and I think that, combined with less than great seeing/tracking on this, it screwed up my stars. I had a lot of magenta stars, and to combat this I took the lazy way out: whilst protecting the galaxy with a mask, I simply desaturated magenta.

Originally Posted by Slawomir

I really like the new revision Lee. A definite improvement over the previous versions - colours are much nicer than Version A and stretching histogram further (on top of a few other Jedi mind tricks in PI) resulted in a beautiful photograph.

Thanks Suavi :-) I overdid noise reduction in the second version, and in the first I did none. This one I think I got a good balance there and it enabled me to push the data a bit more to bring out the tidal tails a bit more.

[strongmanmike (Michael)]

Hey the latest one looks great Lee, love the bright colourful detail in the ball bag (just turn it 90deg to the left ), the antennae are showing really nicely too.

Well done and good on you for persevering

Mike

[codemonkey (Lee)]

Thanks Mike! I saw that version on another monitor and it had some nasty med/low frequency blotching from the noise reduction, so I had another pass at that. Exacerbated some halos on the bigger stars, but eh, good enough now I think.

lol @ the composition comment. I'd originally planned to have it 90deg clockwise from the current version, but my wife convinced me that it was better this way. In the end, I came to agree, as is usually the case whenever the wife argues a point

[strongmanmike (Michael)]

Originally Posted by codemonkey

lol @ the composition comment.

Even through a scope visually it looks like a scrotum

[codemonkey (Lee)]

Originally Posted by strongmanmike

Even through a scope visually it looks like a scrotum

hahah. I think my wife even made a similar comment when she first saw this image.

[RickS (Rick)]

Nice repro, Lee!

Originally Posted by strongmanmike

Even through a scope visually it looks like a scrotum

Have you tried turning your "Ibex" upside down, Mike?

[Geoff45 (Geoff)]

Great picture Lee. The detail is superb. It's actually quite a bright object, so 5 plus hours is probably enough to get the essesntial details.
Geoff

[strongmanmike (Michael)]

Originally Posted by RickS

Have you tried turning your "Ibex" upside down, Mike?

..just saw this comment Rick no I didn't but heck you're right....they look Italian!

[codemonkey (Lee)]

Originally Posted by Geoff45

Great picture Lee. The detail is superb. It's actually quite a bright object, so 5 plus hours is probably enough to get the essesntial details.
Geoff

Thanks Geoff, appreciate it. There's some weird artefacts around the larger stars and even between stars and background galaxies as a result of the noise reduction, but I can't be bothered reprocessing it again, so I'll just have to call it done... for now.

Originally Posted by strongmanmike

..just saw this comment Rick no I didn't but heck you're right....they look Italian!

Bollocks, bollocks everywhere...