Help with my M31 please?

[kirkster501]

Hi this is my M31 after 24 x 120s ISO 800, 10 darks and 20 BIAS with unmoded 1100d on ED80. No field flattener and unguided.

Looks washed out and horrible to me after three iterations of levels and curves. Appreciate your expert view please?

Appreciate if an expert has ten minutes to look at my DSS output file 32Bit TIFF and have a go at improving it and some advice about what to do???? 90 Megs though so not to worry if you have not got time.

https://dl.dropbox.c...0949989/M31.tif

Kind regards, Steve

[steppenwolf]

I'm not sure how much (if any!) of an improvement this makes but I have attempted to get a better colour balance, removed some vignetting and carried out some selective sharpening:-

This is what I did:-

1. Numerous iterations of 'Levels' in increments 10 10 for black level and 0.10 for grey

2. Adjusted grey level for red, green and blue separately to get a balanced histogram (all 3 colours overlaid)

3. Hasta La Vista Green (HLVG) plug-in to remove green hue

4. Numerous iterations of 'Curves' with the black level anchored

5. Modified Curves shape to control the core

6. Gradient Xterminator plug-in to address the vignette using a selection that excluded the two galaxies

7. Adjusted hue to obtain a more 'yellow' image balance

8. Carried out a selective sharpen of the dust lanes

9. Noise Ninja plug-in to address the background noise and then brushed the dust lanes back to unsmoothed

10. I took the liberty of rotating the image to the more popular orientation

You have a basically nice image here although you need to consider a field flattener as peripheral stars are elongated radiating from the core (this is standard with a refractor) and flats will always help any image allowing you greater flexibility when stretching the data.

[VigdisVZ]

There is a lot of information in it, you could probably coax out some more from it.

Oh, and it looks pretty good to me

[kirkster501]

Gee Steve!!!!! That's amazing!!!!! Wow, wow and wow again... I will step through your procedure carefully and see if I can get something similar, albeit i do not have those plug-ins. I need to read and study your book a little more as well on processing.

Thankyou so much Steve for you time and help

Rgds, Steve

[steppenwolf]

My pleasure, Steve. With regard to the plugins, there are some free alternatives.

3. Hasta La Vista Green (HLVG) plug-in to remove green hue

This is free from here.

6. Gradient Xterminator plug-in to address the vignette using a selection that excluded the two galaxies

PhotoShop has a 'vignette filter' under Filter - Distort - Lens Correction which may be worth a try

9. Noise Ninja plug-in to address the background noise and then brushed the dust lanes back to unsmoothed

At least two options here - try Noiseware Community Version or simply Duplicate Layer and Gaussian blur it slightly

[VigdisVZ]

Steve, thats the second time this week I want to kiss you. Downloading HLVG now.

[ollypenrice]

Well done Steve! Flats are soooo important and the fainter the target the more important they are...

Olly

[Jessun]

Here's a somewhat overcooked version, but it shows that there's some interesting colour information to work on.

Thanks for sharing! EDIT: Forgot to tell you that it's a great capture you have there with very little data for the target! Also, I just worked on your jpeg - I am far, far from the expert camp so I'll leave the TIFF for the learned .

[VigdisVZ]

It's gettin there!

[kirkster501]

You guys are the masters !

Going to start guiding next and get my 1100d DSLR modded.