M81 - m82 Widefield

[Neo_uk]

Hi,

Here are my first images of m81 - m82 taken about a month ago seeing as the weather hasn't been that great Ive been attempting to improve my photoshop skills.

This image is x6 - 2min subs Stacked in dss taken with a canon 400d and a skywatcher 200m explorer.

The image had terrible vignetting and had a really bright centre but i managed to darken it off with out loosing too much detail using multiple gradient layers in photoshop cs3.

any pointers on ways i could have made the image better greatly accepted.

regards Chris

[zhgutas]

Ah, someone has an insomnia problem Very nice catch here Chris. I'm no expert, so not much help from me But did you have a play with curves as well? That may help darken the background and bring the dust lanes out a bit more. Choosing only red channel in levels and fiddling around with lower scale may get rid of the redness and smooth out the darkness too.

These are just thoughts, and its 20 to 4 and I'm nackered .. :tard: So you are welcome to ignore this post

Marius

EDIT: I had a quick play with it, hope you don't mind. Anyway I'm, surprised there's still something left in the frame, since I can barely see the laptop itself...

[Paxo]

Chris,

Taking flat frames will probably go a long way to solving the vignetting problem, otherwise an already excellent job with a large amount of detail captured.

Steve..

[steppenwolf]

This is a good capture but vignetting with these large sensors (and the 400D qualifies here!) is always going to be a problem. I'm with Steve, Flat frames are the only solution but they are such a pain to take and get right but well worth the effort if you do them.

[beamish]

Fanastic !! Well done, and very encouraging re Back Yard astronomy .

Karlo

[saturn5]

You can be proud of that one Chris,well done. :thumbleft:

[Cloudwatcher]

There's some very fine detail in that image but for some reason the palette seems to be restricted to the blue end of the spectrum with a bit of magenta thrown in for good luck. The detail shows up best in a monochrome version and you might like to give this a spin in Photoshop.

This is the enhanced colour version I come up with...... lost some of the overall 'feel' of the original but more detail is visible I think.

Just thought,you could try adding some colour filtering to see what happens.

Cheers

CW

Click as usual.

[Neo_uk]

really like what youve done there cw !!!

i did take some monochrome subs the same night as i took these so i load them in to photoshop and then what lol ......go to image>adjustments>levels ?????? then play with the indavidual channels ????

lots of ?????? i know bust just learning lol

many thanks chris

[LostNSpace]

Great capture Chris......

Well done

Mark

[barkis]

Great job Chris. I like that WF shot. Very nice.

CW, you're very adept with PS, another fine piece of work on Chris's behalf.

Ron.

[Sam]

Great image Chris - you've picked up a lot of detail!