Superwinds!

[johnrt]

Happy New Year to one & all, I hope you all had a lovely festive break. My holiday starts tomorrow when you lot all go back to work!

This has been sitting on my desktop all over the holidays, and has gone through more attempts to process than I care to remember. The main goal of this image was to set out and capture as much of the superwind jets of M82 as is possible with a meagre 6" of aperture. It is perhaps a little less subtle than I usually like to present my images, but had to be to really get the most out of the jets.

The data was captured in early 2015 and late 2016 and adds up to about 27 hours of exposure in LRGB and 3nm Ha, all with my 6" RC and Atik 460ex as usual. Image capture in SGPro and then constructed in PI and processed in CS5.

As ever, I hope you like

[ollypenrice]

Work?

This is very crisp indeed! 

Olly

Edit. PS, how much of the jet structure did you find you could capture without Ha?

 

[johnrt]

3 minutes ago, ollypenrice said:

Work?

This is very crisp indeed! 

Olly

The curse of the drinking classes!

[johnrt]

2 hours ago, ollypenrice said:

Work?

This is very crisp indeed! 

Olly

Edit. PS, how much of the jet structure did you find you could capture without Ha?

 

Here's a close up of the red channel with a very basic log stretch, you can see there is a fair amount of the jets showing there, this is 4.5 hours in 5 minute subs binned 2x2. The Ha added more structure to the image when applied.

I applied the Ha to the red as "linear dodge (add)" blending mode, then masked it off and gradually brought it in with a soft low opacity brush. The Ha under the mask had it's neck wrung to within an inch of it's life & the bottom clipped out to remove any effect to the background areas.

[ollypenrice]

Thanks, John.

[Maximidius]

That's an epic image of M82, love the details you've pulled out in those jets, very well done indeed! 

[Barry-Wilson]

A great rendition of this iconic HST image - after all, the galaxy is 'only' a mere 11.5 million light years from your back garden John.  Staggering detail you've captured with your rig.  Fabulous .

[PatrickGilliland]

Hi John,

Happy new year.  Super first image for the year, the colours are great and the jets excellent.  I am experimenting on this (and M81) currently 100 subs in, though seeing has been poor.  At @ollypenrice From what i have seen so far with 100+ lum and 30 ha the lum is just that and the Ha adds structure but if you stretch and compress the lum in various ways there is a lot of detail just in that.  

This is just the lum STF stretch (hence bloated stars) with 2 iterations of HDMRT (so I could see whats there) - Quite a bit it appears!  With some careful work i think Lum will reveal a lot, hopefullyw ith HA will add some more too

Paddy 

[johnrt]

Thank you kindly Max, Barry & Paddy! This is the sort of target that makes me itch for more aperture, I'm trying to ignore the 8" RC in the classifieds at the moment

Yes there was plenty of the jets to be found in the Luminance too. The challenge was digging it out from around the super luminous core of the galaxy, a real tricky one to process!

[johnrt]

Although the original goal was to reveal as much as possible of the jets in M82, I couldn't leave this alone and had to go back and reprocess in my more "usual" style. So here is version 2

All the same data, processed with a view to presenting the whole galaxy sympathetically, rather than wringing it's neck for the jets.

 

[morimarty]

I do prefer your usual more sympathetic processing of version 2 John, it as a more natural look to me. version 1 certainly highlights the elusive jets though.

[johnrt]

18 hours ago, morimarty said:

I do prefer your usual more sympathetic processing of version 2 John, it as a more natural look to me. version 1 certainly highlights the elusive jets though.

Yes the top version is a bit much isn't it? Especially when side by side with ver 2!

[andyo]

Great capture stunning detail for me version 2 is better as morimarty said more natural

[Fay]

Worth all the work you have done John, great image, as usual

 

Fay