That is amazing Ramo, especially for such little data. How do you get the background so dark? Is this all photoshop or does it come out like that. All my pics, even at iso 800 look so light polluted
Thanks everyone; Acarleton, I live on the edge of a smallish town, so LP is not too bad, although for 253 I am looking right across the town, so I cop what LP there is. I have four streetlights within 50 metres of my
imaging site. I rarely do anything much outside of DSS. I have PS but
rarely do any processing with it. The only thing that I do to try and
keep the sky dark is in DSS. After the final pic is produced by DSS
I use the RGB/luminance/ saturation window to produce my final pic.
You will see low, medium, and high luminance sliders. One low
slider is set at 80% by default. When otherwise happy with your pic you can move that slider further to the right , which will darken the sky
somewhat. You will see a medium slider which from memory is set at 33%. Careful minor movements of that one will also darken the sky, but at the price of a loss of medium level detail, such as the wispy edges of
a nebula. I'm a digital newbie; these are just tips that I've been given.
The only real down side is that all DSS sliders are very difficult to move in small steps. Happy processing.
I don't take separate darks; I just use noise reduction.
raymo
Last edited by raymo; 09-02-2014 at 04:29 PM.
Reason: more info
Hi Jo, thanks, I'm still in the early stages of learning digital imaging. Being as I don't do any serious post image processing, and probably never will, I just let the camera do all the work. It does mean that I
can do only half as much imaging in each session, but being long
retired I can go out on any suitable night without worrying about getting up for work.
raymo
I lied, here's another try. I didn't see all the noise until I attached it.
It was actually quite strange; the noise was much less prominent when
working in DSS than it is now.
raymo
Raymo! I'm so impressed! I haven't tried to image any galaxies yet, but look forward to it. I only hope I can get a result like this one!
I looked up this guy and it is way too low in the west for me to attempt - I have tall trees all around my block making my situation like an obsevatory that cannot rotate it's slot. Anyway, prestty soon I will give M83 a go and possibly NGC 5128 after that. I only have the 90mm refractor, so I need to look for the larger objects at this stage.
But to finish, I gotta say you are doing great work with short exposures and DSS. Well done!
It certainly looks like you sure know what your doing, I have no idea of how you cleaned up that background like you've done. You'll have to teach us young blokes a trick or two.
Thanks Bruce and Jo. I was so peed off that for some unfathomable reason, the noise was more pronounced after I came out of DSS, that
I determined to find a way of reducing it. RGB and luminance in DSS were
obviously not going to do the trick, so I had to resort to P/Shop. I spent a couple of hours foraging about in there, and found Selective Colour in the
Image Adjustments drop down. I increased black just enough to reduce
the noise, but not enough to begin affecting other colours.
Hope that helps with any future noise you may suffer.
Raymo
reminds me of the first time I saw it, awesome galaxy 
