M33 in HaLRGB

[cfpendock]

This colourful and large galaxy was the subject of 24 x 10 minutes Lum, and around 24 x 5 minutes each of RGB binned 2x2, with the R blended with 11 x 15 minutes of Ha.  Taken with the Tak 106 at 530mm focal length and Atik 4000 camera.  Comments and criticisms welcomed, especially regarding colour saturation or other processing issues.....

 

Chris

 

[ollypenrice]

There's an awful lot to like. No doubt about that.

For me there is an 'HDR wavelets' look to this image which I find too intrusive. It shows in the small dark patches scattered around near the central spiral arms. In general I think the spiral arm contrasts are too strong. Of course, now you'll tell me that you never went anywhere near HDR wavelets and I'll have to defend myself by saying that, none the less, that's the look!!! 

You describe the galaxy as colourful and in my original attempts I pushed the colour to make it so, but then I looked at the most admired imagers' versions and found that they were not so colourful after all. When I let the colour spoeak for itself I found it quite muted and preferred my result.

This is a very good image so I'm being appropriately picky but I think you still have the vestiges of some vignetting in three of the corners.

Olly

[cfpendock]

Thank you very much Olly, for taking the time to look at this image, and for your kind comments.  I know exactly what you mean by the contrasty look of the spiral arms.  This was perhaps due to over-zealous use of the hi-pass filter with overlay mode - I wanted to bring out the dark lanes - they looked interesting, and of course I probably went too far….  I’m not sure what “HDR wavelets” are, let alone how to apply them! But no doubt this has lead to the similar effect.

 

With regard to the colour - yes, I pushed it.  To be honest, when I first added the luminance at an early stage of processing, the image looked stunning - very sparkly and silvery.  But, as you say, others have produced this (an excellent example today from CCD Imager ) so I wanted to push the colours further to see what happened.  I have to say that in this respect I was inspired by Paddy Gilliland’s recent amazing image (where I actually commented that his was a tad over-saturated for my taste!): https://stargazerslounge.com/topic/281065-m33-in-all-its-glory/#comment-3076691

 

You are quite right about the vignetting.  No flats….

 

Thanks again for the comments

 

Chris

[MARS1960]

Very nice image Chris.

I am collecting data on this, only 3hrs thus far so a long way to go yet,  but if it looks half as good as yours i will be very happy.

[PatrickGilliland]

Think Olly nailed it - lots to like but a little aggressive in some areas.  I little rework can resolve that and the image overall is nice with all the right content.

Paddy

[cfpendock]

Thanks Mark and Paddy

Chris