M31 HaLRGB

[Pompey Monkey]

Almost an accidental image captured over several nights earlier in the month - I was actually testing the HEQ5 with the Esprit 80 for a for forthcoming trip to La Palma, and one thing led to another (as the actress said...)

This has been a bit of a slog for me: Learning many new techniques in PI.

The image is not perfect by any means - over-saturated star cores due to the masked stretch, to name but one. And I'm still having problems with gradients, but I guess that's light pollution for you!

About 40*300s of RGB each, another 60*300s Lum, and 12*1200s Ha. I used the lot to create a "super luminance master". I blended the Ha into the Red channel with "max(Ha,LRGB_R)" in pixel math. This is subtle, but really enhances the emission nebulae on the outlying regions.

Not perfect, but still an awful lot to be happy about, especially the multitude of individual stars in the outer spiral arms! Definitely worth a look at full size

All comments welcome.

 

 

Edit: it's nowhere near as black-clipped as this on my image

 

Edit2: It looks vastly different on my two monitors...

 

[daz]

That's very nice indeed!!

It looks a touch pink on my laptop - but that could be my monitor!

I've read about the super luminance technique, not had a chance to try for myself yet... 

[ChrisLX200]

Lots of good detail in that Paul! I found that with the Ha channel I had to clip the background to black  so as to avoid an overall colour caste, and also masked and then dimmed the core to stop it going pink.

Know what you mean about different monitors, I recently bought a calibrator to help with that.

ChrisH

[PatrickGilliland]

Nice work and looks like the learning is paying off - Chris has nailed it with the HA points need to think where you want to see it and what effect it will have then apply.

Paddy

[wimvb]

Very nice image. You captured the faint halo-like nebulosity surrounding this galaxy. I think you also overstretched the image a bit; the star on the very right edge has an unnatural halo.  If the core of the galaxy isn't blown out in the unstretched image, you can try HDRMultiscaleTransform or LocalHistogramEqualization, to get some more detail in the bright parts.

Thanks for sharing