Great Barred Spiral Galaxy - NGC 1365

[batema (Mark)]

NGC 1365, also known as the Great Barred Spiral Galaxy, is a barred spiral galaxy about 56 million light-years away in the constellation Fornax.

To say I struggled processing this is an understatement.

This image consists of 7 hours 40 minutes luminance data and 1 hour 25 minutes of each red, green and blue channels.

Link to my high resolution image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/134809...posted-public/

Taken with a TEC 140 on Astrophysics 1100gto using a SBIG 8300m with self-guiding filter wheel.

As always comments and advice greatly appreciated.

Mark

[alistairsam]

Looks really good Mark, but the flickr page opens and then goes blank.
not sure if its my browser though.

Cheers
Alistair

Edit: worked fine from another machine.
love the details.

[h0ughy (David)]

oh my, oh oh oh wow. excuse me just having a moment.

fantastic work - i love it

[alpal]

That's a top job Mark.
You should be proud of that effort.

cheers
Allan

[gregbradley]

This must be your first quite long exposure right Mark? Its looks great. Galaxy colours look good. One tip is to do sharpening with a layer hide all mask so you reveal only areas you want sharpened to come through (Louie Atlas has free tutorials on these). The stars look like they have been sharpened or too much deconvolution and have developed hard edges. You could select the stars and add a slight Gaussian blur to soften them back up from here.

Greg.

[codemonkey (Lee)]

Nice work! I love this galaxy, been on my list for a while now... gets into a good position for me towards the end of November... can't wait.

Seen lots of variation in colour on this one... I personally prefer a bit more blue.

[Placidus (Mike and Trish)]

Well done, Mark. Colour is lovely. Lots of detail. Good handling of the bright core. Your wide field shows lots of pleasing faint fuzzies in the background.

[batema (Mark)]

Thank you all and I will check out Louie Atlas's free tutorials Greg. I have tried to soften the stars with a 1 pixel Gaussian Blur and have blued up the galaxy arms. I think it looks better.

[Paul Haese]

Mark your detail level is pretty good and processing looks smooth to me. I don't think there is enough blue in the image as it stands though. There don't appear to be any blue stars present or if they are they are quite muted in saturation. The arms of the galaxy are similarly looking quite muted too.

[rustigsmed (Russell)]

nice one Mark, one of my favourite galaxies. you've got some good extension on faint the arms too.

cheers

[RickS (Rick)]

That's a really nice image, Mark. Well done!