Hubble Legacy Archive data processed - M51

[Russe]

This data is from the Hubble Legacy Archive!!

I had great fun (while being bored by the blumming weather) having a look at processing this. Actually - darn easy, because the data is so extremely good.

This is the guide I used for this (very small) feat:

http://de.reddit.com/r/astrophotography/comments/1w6vsp/an_exercise_in_postprocessing_hubble_data_a_how/

[nmoushon]

It is a lot of fun processing those Hubble Archive files. This is a great process as well. I should go back and download some as the weather here is horrible and extremely cold.

[Zakalwe]

Its funny that you posted this now.

I "assembled" M51 this week:

http://zoom.it/mR3g

I say "assembled" as the original data had already been assembled from 16 panes into a single image per channel.....the data is beautiful.

Separate RGB files combines to create colour image.
False Luminance layer created in LAB space in Photoshop.
Hydrogen-alpha data merged with the Red data to create HaR data which then replaced the Red channel.
HaR data also used as another Luminance layer.

Lots of sharpening and High-Pass filtering to up the overall sharpness of the image.

The zoomable image is a 50% resize of the original image. The original data that I was working on ended up 145mb in size (11,000 pixels by 8200. 13.5 feet in height if it was printed at 72 DPI