Yet another M31 - and some questions....

[ollypenrice]

Hi Alve,

Capturing the data is the easy part of the job, converting it to something like Olly's is where the fun starts. The road is long and painful but it will happen. I have  just started like yourself so I can tell you that there is no single software that does everything, there is no magic wand. Having a huge data file from a DSLR is good but unless you have the latest Mac Pro with multiple 8 core processor and 32 Gig of ram, I'd advise you to Bin the files down for processing, you can always keep the original gigantic stack if you wish.

A.G

I don't follow this. I work from full size images. Do you mean you software bin down to 2x2 when you process? I wouldn't do that.

Olly

[lensman57]

I don't follow this. I work from full size images. Do you mean you software bin down to 2x2 when you process? I wouldn't do that.

Olly

That is correct Olly, I either  Bin it at the start or reduce the size in PS during post process. This is mostly to do with the huge size of the DSLR captures.The file size of my ATIK 428 OSC is managable for me but I can't be bothered with 200MB Tiff files.

Regards,

A.G

[ollypenrice]

200mb is indeed quite a lot! 

Olly

[glowingturnip]

Hi Alve,

Please forgive me for having another go at this one, but I really wasn't happy with my first attempt, so I hope this attempt does better justice to your excellent data.  

I used both initial files this time, with the shorter exposure dropped in for the core, and I seem to have resolved my colour balance issues.  Also tried to present it with nice sharpness around the main dustlanes, but hopefully image is not to noisy ?  

Tiff is uploading to here:  http://www.stupey.com/Astronomy/M31_ps.tif

I now have serious data envy by the way, it makes my attempt look rubbish.

Stuart