NGC6744 my longest image yet 38hours 50 minutes

[Ross G]

Hi Greg,

Wow..what an amazing photo and what a beautiful galaxy!

Your artistry and technical skills have again raised the bar.

Thanks.

Ross.

[jase (Jason)]

A solid image Greg. Well done. As H said, a bit more saturation would help. Out of interest, how far back did you go in the processing of the existing data sets from the other instruments? Did you stack the subs for all instruments as one stack or simply add the finished 16bit TIFFs as an overlay per instrument?

[niko]

[gregbradley]

Originally Posted by Ross G

Hi Greg,

Wow..what an amazing photo and what a beautiful galaxy!

Your artistry and technical skills have again raised the bar.

Thanks.

Ross.

Cheers Ross. I am glad you liked it.

Originally Posted by niko

Thanks Niko.

Originally Posted by jase

A solid image Greg. Well done. As H said, a bit more saturation would help. Out of interest, how far back did you go in the processing of the existing data sets from the other instruments? Did you stack the subs for all instruments as one stack or simply add the finished 16bit TIFFs as an overlay per instrument?

More saturation?? I'll never win a Malin award at that rate

I already upped it and I am happy with where it is. More and it starts to look unnatural.

I did both. One image's masters are in a hard drive in a crashed laptop but I have the finished image. A lot of the luminance was stacked together. I kept finding earlier images of it. Registar helped with some registering. You'd think Photoshop would have a decent registering tool.
The Transform function is dinosaur but if the images are close you can use it. CCDstack does not handle colour images well. The other choice would be Images Plus which handles colour images really well.

Greg.

[atalas]

Try AA5 Greg!

[Lester]

Wonderful image Greg. The longer the exposure time the more beauty is revealed. Thanks for the view.

[jenchris (Jennifer)]

Why not just up the ISO to 1,600,000?
I've never seen anything so utterly amazing in my life - simply because of the time spent collecting photons.
If you owned Hubble,it may have been a nice pic. This way it is an amazing effort - well done indeed.

[John Hothersall]

That galaxy is definitely on fire with all that time, great arms.

John.

[Stevec35 (Steve)]

Pretty impressive Greg. Some of the stars do look a little over processed though, perhaps as a result of combining data from several instruments. Some people have suggested more saturation. Personally I would suggest less as you seem to be flirting a bit with colour noise in the centre.

Cheers

Steve

[gregbradley]

Originally Posted by atalas

Try AA5 Greg!

Good tip I'll check it out. Thanks.

Originally Posted by Lester

Wonderful image Greg. The longer the exposure time the more beauty is revealed. Thanks for the view.

Long exposure is always the aim but not always practical for a million different reasons. So it worked out well that I have accumulated 14 hours lately and another 7 here and 8 there so it all added up nicely.

Originally Posted by jenchris

Why not just up the ISO to 1,600,000?
I've never seen anything so utterly amazing in my life - simply because of the time spent collecting photons.
If you owned Hubble,it may have been a nice pic. This way it is an amazing effort - well done indeed.

Wow, thanks for the nice compliment! I am glad you liked it so much.

Originally Posted by John Hothersall

That galaxy is definitely on fire with all that time, great arms.

John.

Cheers John. I've always liked this target. Some targets are worth effort.

Originally Posted by Stevec35

Pretty impressive Greg. Some of the stars do look a little over processed though, perhaps as a result of combining data from several instruments. Some people have suggested more saturation. Personally I would suggest less as you seem to be flirting a bit with colour noise in the centre.

Cheers

Steve

Yes I was also thinking of perhaps blending the stars of one of the better images into it rather than building them up like that. I agree it would polish the image further.

Perhaps a project later on. I still have several images still unprocessed. We've had a good run of clear weather in the last month.

With regards to the colour saturation yes I think I am right at the edge with it and a bit backed off wouldn't harm the image look.
A little bit left in reserve to tame unwanted effects isn't a bad idea.

Greg.