M106 in LRGB

[cfpendock]

This is M106 in LRGB from Monday evening.  21x 5 minutes Luminance and 8 x 5 minutes each RGB.  Tak and Atik as below.

 

I was amazed and excited to see just how many really tiny galaxies showed up. I think that some Ha could have enhanced the detail of the galaxy centre but of course there is no more clear sky!  A pity, because I don’t find the my rendition of this galaxy particularly outstanding from a structural point of view.

 

Chris

 

[theastrodragon]

Lovely detail.

Shoot some H-alpha to go with it when that nasty moon-thing is in the way...

[Knighty2112]

Awesome shot. Well done!  

[alan4908]

A very good image Chris.  

On your structural detail point: if your using Photoshop, I've found that using HDR toning gives good detail enhancing with small galaxies. 

Alan

[laudropb]

Very nice image.

[cfpendock]

14 hours ago, theastrodragon said:

Shoot some H-alpha to go with it when that nasty moon-thing is in the way

That is a really excellent idea - thanks!

Chris

[cfpendock]

4 hours ago, alan4908 said:

On your structural detail point: if your using Photoshop, I've found that using HDR toning gives good detail enhancing with small galaxies. 

Brilliant.  thanks very much Alan - I felt something was missing and had thought the Ha would give it.  But the HDR (only VERY lightly applied - and only to the M101 itself) seems to have made the image much more dynamic, despite some artefacts showing at expanded view, as shown below:  Thanks very much - it's how I learn!

Chris

[theastrodragon]

It's sharpened it, but I wonder if you were too aggressive - there are dark circles visible around many of the stars at full size now.

[Barry-Wilson]

You're starting to highlight some lovely fine detail in the core of M106 and you've framed well and captured NGC4217, 4248 and 4226 etc - great to see the little galaxies too.

On my monitor I do see large colloured halos in the background surrounding the larger stars - is that something you can reduce?

Barry

[cfpendock]

7 hours ago, theastrodragon said:

It's sharpened it, but I wonder if you were too aggressive - there are dark circles visible around many of the stars at full size now

Thanks, theastrodragon, you are absolutely correct.   Initially I was disappointed at the lack of detail and so I probably over sharpened (the galaxy region), trying to pull out detail which probably wasn't there.  I think that more subs would help with smoothing and perhaps reducing the necessity to sharpen so much.

 

2 hours ago, Barry-Wilson said:

On my monitor I do see large colloured halos in the background surrounding the larger stars - is that something you can reduce?

Thank you very much for your kind comments Barry.  Although you say that I am getting some fine detail in the core, I am not at all happy with this detail - but at least it improves the overall image compared with the original non-HDR'd version.  And I am very pleased with the smaller galaxies...

 The halos are another matter.  I think I could probably get rid of them - I will experiment.  But I think they are there because most of the stretching was done without stars, but because they were bright stars, the stretching brought out the natural "flare" of the stars, the area of flare not having been removed in the star removal.  I suppose that one way would be to remove the stars, and then increase the area of removal for these particular stars????