Finally no clouds so heres NGC2903

[Eri]

So first time with clear skies in a while so out went the kit, I've taken about 4 hours worth of various DSO's and thought while it finishes its run I'd do a quick and dirty process of a 3min sub I took as a test for NGC2903

Very pleased with what it gave me so far and cant wait for the rest of the data to be finished, once this run has completed its a quick look at jupiter then pack away and process later on today

[wimvb]

Very nice catch, can't wait to see the final image.

Happy new year

[Eri]

thanks wimvb, happy new your to you too.

This is my current revision, i'm sure theres more to find in there theres 1.5 hours worth of data, learning more and more about photoshop with this heh, have tried PI on a 45 day trial but I just cant get to grips with it.

[ollypenrice]

Do you have any flats? They'd be a big help.

Olly

[Davey-T]

Took the liberty of a quick hack in P'Shop to remove the gradient and lighten sky.

Still needs cropping where the edges don't line up.

Dave

[laudropb]

Nice image to start the year with.

[Eri]

Olly, I do have some flats yes just restacked with them and processed this but if i'm honest i dont know what I'm looking at to see if anything is still off, still has some noise when viewed on 2 of my monitors but on my main processing monitor the noise is a lot less noticeable, I hate different monitor outputs

Thanks Laudropb I was wondering if this would come out when taking it and am pleased with what i've got so far and grateful for all suggestions/criticisms given by all 

[wimvb]

You've captured quite some detail in and around the galaxy, but in your published image the core seems overstretched.

I would've expected more impact from the flat frames.

If you have the possibility to process in PI, I suggest cropping the image and using DBE to even out the background. Unfortunately,  I don't know how to achieve the same in PS.

Good luck.

[Eri]

I found a

on youtube and have re-attempted this in PI with the following result, I'd be grateful for your opinions wimvb, background is still a bit washed out it seems to me and i don't seem to get it any darker yet

[Davey-T]

Looking better, I don't use PI but I think the background extraction should do a better job than that, don't know what the difference is between ABE  and DBE we need a PI expert.

I just use a Gaussian blur filter in PS  to remove gradients,

Dave

Edit: the sky shouldn't be black

[wimvb]

Great improvement. You cleaned up the background nicely, and the core shows detail. The background still shows some very weak gradients. If you try to stretch the image much further, you will only enhance these. From here on it's basically playing around with small changes.

You can try tiny amounts of masked stretches. There is a process called masked stretch in PI, but you can also create a rangemask to protect the stars and core of the galaxy.

Other things you can do is try to increase the colour saturation somewhat. One way to do this is a LRGB combination. You can extract a luminance layer from your image for this. This should also restore colour to the bright stars.

I played around with the png file and isolated the galaxy.

As you can see, the quick changes I made came at the cost of increased noise. You should be able to achieve better results from the original data.

Good luck!

[Eri]

thanks for the advice and comments i'll revisit this either later today or another day as i've decided to have another headache boo 2 so far today,

I think i'll be buying the full PI as once I've got my head around how it works it does produce better results for me than PS does

[wimvb]

I use PI because it contains everything I need in one package. I started out by using DSS, but had no 16 bit image processing tool. I chose PI over DSS and PS. PI has a steep learning curve, but there are many great tutorials out there. I found Blochs videos very good and educational, you can learn a lot from them.

Whatever tools you use, in the end it's the data and the person doing the processing that determine the outcome.

The good thing with all the cloudy days and nights is that they create plenty of opportunities to learn processing.