IC348 and NGC1333

[Tom OD]

Hi SGL,

Its been ages since I posted a pic, mainly due to an ongoing project, but I'm also inbetween software processing. I'm trying to get to grips with PixInsight, so I'm always hopping back and forth between that and Photoshop.

Anyway, this is not the finished pic, but its raining, I'm stuck indoors so I was messing about with it. I got lazy and just cropped a lot of the bottom of the iamge due to satellite trails I have yet to fix. This is a 2 LRGB pane mosaic, 15 hours of Lum and 18 hours of RGB, taken from the Almanzora Valley in Spain, Aug, Sept 2012. Even with 9 hours of RGB per panel I found it to be quite noisey. Some of that background dust is pretty dim.

As for processing, it was stacked and aligned in AstroArt5, Cropped, DBE'ed, Star Aligned, Gradient Mege mosaic for the Lum panels only, Background Neutralisation, Colour Calibration, Noise Reduction in Linear mode in PI. Then after histo stretch in PI, some star morp, and SCNR in PI. I then assembled the RGB panes in PS, and did some luminosity blending, masked saturation, and a Lab Brightness / contrast boost. I didn't do any sharpening on the image or LHE (PI) or Noels Contrast in PS. I'm working on a new laptop that I have not calibrated to Adobe RGB with a spyder or any device. So I have no idea how this will look posted. The colours may vary wildy from PC to PC.

Just as I was posting to flickr, link below I spotted my PS was in sRGB mode not Adobe RGB when I was processing this. D'oh!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/28192200@N02/8528939580/in/photostream

Thanks Tom.

[jnc71106]

Eeek that's a bit tasty. What are the details of the sub lengths, scope etc

[Tom OD]

Thanks jnc, whoops forgot the scope details. Its a Tak 106N and Atik 11000 ccd. Subs are all 10mins long. So 45x10min for each Lum pane and 18x10min for each R, G and B, for each pane.

[Mark72]

Very impressive Tom,

Great work, nice colours and especially the dust came through very well.

Mark

[JKB]

Beautiful image tom.

Congrats

Cheers

Jamie

[ultranova]

wow that is nice, its going to be something

special once finished that's for sure.

Paul

[Martin-Devon]

It's a great image Tom & has a bit of everything in there - lovely star colours, huge dark gas clouds, and coloured reflections - very nicely processed too. Interesting that you are starting to learn PixInsight - I'm about to embark on this as well now once I can free some time up. It's a steep learning curve looking at the video tutorials, I just wish they would name the process actions with easier names rather than all the technical stuff they use!

[Dangerous-Dave]

Awesome work Tom.

[Tom OD]

Interesting that you are starting to learn PixInsight - I'm about to embark on this as well now once I can free some time up. It's a steep learning curve looking at the video tutorials, I just wish they would name the process actions with easier names rather than all the technical stuff they use!

Martin, there is a huge difference in style and look between PS and PI. Its a bit confusing starting off. I'm just doing and re-doing things a lot to get familar with the processes. I used to use the Astro Zone method in PS. Breaking an image into zones, the dim, middle and bright zones. Using levels and curves to process each section. Well in PI maybe things are starting to sink in a bit. I 'm starting (maybe incorrectly) to see the wavelet layers in PI, just like the Zones in PS. I don't see much difference between using Dust and scratches, or the Low/High pass filters in PS to isolate diferent parts of the image, in the same way as Atrouswavelets in PI. Here is a screenshot of some noise control practice in ATWT I was doing last night on a linear image with just background, dim and Dark nebula from the IC348 side of the image. This works well as I have a lot of data in the image. Before I liked Noel Carbonis' Deep space noise reduction.

Thanks Guys for the comments.