Thw Whale and Hockey Stick

[Bizibilder]

I managed another imaging run last night, even though the sky was far from clear!! This time the target was NGC 4631 "The Whale" (& NGC 4627) along with NGC 4656 and, making the angle, NGC 4657 (The Hockey stick). SW ED80 PRO f/6.5 Canon 1000D ISO800 36x5min subs processed in DSS, PS CS5 and Noel’s Actions.

I really must try harder with the processing!! I've spent a couple of hours on this and have got to the point where I can no longer see what I'm doing!!

[ollypenrice]

Nice capture. Could you seek out a tad more red, maybe?

Your comment makes me wonder about how long we all spend on processing. Two hours seems PDQ to me! I spent two days working on Alnitak alone on a pic last year... Nuts.

Olly

[Bizibilder]

I've had a play, in fact started from scratch! Hopefully this time I've got rid of the blue that I seem to be cursed with. In the end I cut the galaxies into their own layer, rebalanced the colours and flattened - I then spent quite a while tidying up the edges!! HOW do you do that the easy way?? You must be able to Feather the edges when putting two layers together - I just don't know how to yet.

PS I added a few "pretty spikes" just to cheer myself up (Back to work tomorrow for a rest .