Markarian's ball and chain!

[ollypenrice]

Two visiting SGLers, Dave and Zoe, captured this in a night with The 11 meg Atik in the FSQ/EM200 rig. 6x15 minutes L and 5 x 10 mins per colour. I had a jinxed day on the processing since I seemed to have changed something in Photoshop which means my selection tools behave bizzarely.

Anyway, we spotted the possibility of framing Markarian's with this striking ring of galaxies off to its left so we tried it. The processing has concentrated on getting the stars down and the galaxies up.

It's fun to see it a bit larger and check out the galaxies. http://ollypenrice.s...b5hP7Q&lb=1&s=O

Olly, Dave and Zoe.

[Steve Ward]

Fabulous detail in such tiny objects . . .

[andyo]

Markarians chain really is a nice shot just to see so many galaxies in one frame is amazing,great image

[ian_bird]

Olly

I just wonder how many telescopes were pointing back at you! So many Galaxies! So many planets!

And I bet a Takahashi costs an arm and a leg on all those planets too!

Cheers

Ian

[ollypenrice]

I wore my best head torch just in case they can resolve that well...

Olly

[ultranova]

Amazing piece of sky and a very nicely caught and processed picture of it

Well done all three of you

Paul

[Ewan]

Stunning shot Olly, give Dave and Zoe my best :-), only wish i had the fov for this.

[Gina]

That's totally amazing

[cfpendock]

One of the finest images I have seen.

Chris

[Marki]

Magnificent. I almost got lost in the larger image....so many stars, so many galaxies!

Congratulations to all involved in making this stunning image :salute:!

[billhinge]

pretty ;-)

[peter shah]

super shot and nice to see a wider view

[AndyUK]

Aside from the colour and the detail in the main galaxies, there are an insane number of fuzzies in the background - For "Galaxy season" this surely has to be one of the most interesting areas of the night sky!

[JamesF]

Lovely image. I could sit and pick galaxies out of that for ages.

James

[swag72]

Oh my ................ Checking that out at full size, the number of galaxies is insane!!!!

[ollypenrice]

Thanks all. When I can get Photoshop to behave I'll work on the blue noise. If anybody knows what I've done to it I'd love to know; if I use Colour Select on some blue pixels it selects some randomly not blue pixels! Also the magic wand has started selecting a much larger area though I've set ithe parameters to those of another computer on which it behaves normally. Doh!

Olly

[opticalpath]

Great image, Olly & Co. What a field!

About the PS problem ..... I'm sure you already checked this, but the only thing I can think of is if the Eyedropper tool was set to a larger sample size - say 5x5 instead of 3x3; then the Magic Wand tool would select a wider range of pixels for a given Tolerance setting.

Adrian

[ollypenrice]

Great image, Olly & Co. What a field!

About the PS problem ..... I'm sure you already checked this, but the only thing I can think of is if the Eyedropper tool was set to a larger sample size - say 5x5 instead of 3x3; then the Magic Wand tool would select a wider range of pixels for a given Tolerance setting.

Adrian

Bless you sir! I recently increased my samples to 5x5 without realizing that this would affect the tools. I thought it was just a measuring sample. What a relief!

Olly

[Michael1971]

awesome details even in those tiny galaxies! great work

[opticalpath]

Bless you sir! I recently increased my samples to 5x5 without realizing that this would affect the tools. I thought it was just a measuring sample. What a relief!

Olly

It can be quite handy sometimes; for example, setting sample size to 1x1 gives the Magic Wand tool a sharper, less fuzzy selectivity - not usually what you want but useful sometimes if you're working up close to pixel level.

Adrian