M81 family portrait

[Mike Hawtin]

Taken through a C6 Hyperstar with an Atik428EX and Baader filters this is a two panel L HaRGB image, each panel is 35 L, 15 R, 12 G, 13 B and 12 Ha all at 300 sec duration for a total integration time of 14.5 hours.  Conditions were pretty poor for the Red and Blue channels which gave me problems with magenta halo's around the stars and also with making a decent DBE model for the backgrounds.  Anyway here it is along with an annotated Lum image for interest, thanks for looking.

Mike

[laudropb]

Very nice image and presentation.

[James]

I like the annotations (and the image itself of course!). You've got oodles of flux and I like the colours

 

James

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Very nice indeed.

[Daniel-K]

this is excellent but i find the whites are just a little blown out otherwise its spot on.

[Mike Hawtin]

Cheers chaps, glad you like the image and thanks for taking the time to comment.

Mike

[wimvb]

Great image. Getting the DBE parameters right must be a challenge due to the IFN. One technique I have seen used on occasion is to make the DBE samples large but few and just ignore if they cover stars. It seems that the DBE models ignore stars in the samples. Anyway, I think you did very well on this image.

[Mike Hawtin]

Thanks Wim, actually I did use only five or six DBE samples on the green and Luminance stacks, it was the red and blue which gave me the most trouble, I think I must have had some thin cloud interference which caused uneven colour casts and gave me horrible gradients.

Thanks again.

Mike

[toxic]

now that's a lovely image i like every thing about it 

[Mike Hawtin]

Cheers Chris, appreciate the comment.

Mike