IC342

[Tom OD]

Hi SGL,

Olly already posted his version on this. My original version came out purple, and looked more like M101. This second version was done without Colour Calibration in PI.

This is 15.5hrs of LRGB with the TEC140, Atik 460ex on a Mesu. I prefer the more zoomed in version myself.

Taken from Les Granges Dec 2017

Tom

[Sam]

Nice one Tom, I love this galaxy, I imaged it a few years ago when I was in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s great to see it being imaged and given the size and beauty of it, it’s surprising more people don’t give it a go. This blog post has the image I took of IC342, I know it certainly takes patience and a lot of processing.

[MikeODay]

Wonderful images Tom - great detail and love the deep golden colours.

[Tom OD]

41 minutes ago, Sam said:

Nice one Tom, I love this galaxy, I imaged it a few years ago when I was in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s great to see it being imaged and given the size and beauty of it, it’s surprising more people don’t give it a go. This blog post has the image I took of IC342, I know it certainly takes patience and a lot of processing.

Thanks Guys. I was amazed at how big it was. No sign of it visually in a 14inch sct the same night, except for the core. its well hidden in the plane of the milky way.

Tom.

[wxsatuser]

Looks like a lot of Ha regions in there.

[Sam]

I remember when I was imaging it, it was really hard to be sure that it was on the chip, I had to trust that my starmap was right. Most other galaxies at least showed up a bit of a core with the 30sec test images, this one needed 5mins just to see if the framing was right - then no chance of seeing how far it extended.

[ollypenrice]

That's great, Tom. This is such a hard target! 

Olly

[swag72]

Super Tom...... It's so interesting to see a galaxy that is outside of our normal colour expectations.

 

[wxsatuser]

2 hours ago, swag72 said:

Super Tom...... It's so interesting to see a galaxy that is outside of our normal colour expectations.

 

Having not seen this one before I had to look it up.
Quite a few imagers have the same result as Tom and Olly but I did find one by Tony Hallas that has blue arms.

Not wishing to criticize Tom or Olly, I have great respect for their processing prowess but I wonder what causes the difference?

[swag72]

4 minutes ago, wxsatuser said:

Having not seen this one before I had to look it up.
Quite a few imagers have the same result as Tom and Olly but I did find one by Tony Hallas that has blue arms.

Not wishing to criticize Tom or Olly, I have great respect for their processing prowess but I wonder what causes the difference?

Actually you are quite right...... I had a look and there's an interesting rather blue rendition by Ken Crawford....... I'll post a ink if the OP is happy with it  

[toxic]

Oh my goodness this is stunning beautiful detail and the colour is gorgeous  

[ollypenrice]

2 hours ago, wxsatuser said:

Having not seen this one before I had to look it up.
Quite a few imagers have the same result as Tom and Olly but I did find one by Tony Hallas that has blue arms.

Not wishing to criticize Tom or Olly, I have great respect for their processing prowess but I wonder what causes the difference?

Always a good question. I've just reprocessed mine from scratch because it's such an oddball to work on. Nothing in the world is going to give blue arms from our data, I promise. My colour is not dissimilar to Tom's though, as usual, I go for high saturation. I think my mistake in the first process was to try to get the look you expect in a galaxy image - hard detail, small field stars etc. In my reprocess I looked at Tom's, preferred it and tried again, accepting that this is called 'The Hidden Galaxy' for good reason. It's hiding behind a dense patch of Milky Way which I think has to be included as part of the picture.

But in the end your colour is what came down the spout, barring minor adjustment for gradients etc.

So our last image of the year was a good old challenge!

Olly

[Tom OD]

9 hours ago, Sam said:

I remember when I was imaging it, it was really hard to be sure that it was on the chip, I had to trust that my starmap was right. Most other galaxies at least showed up a bit of a core with the 30sec test images, this one needed 5mins just to see if the framing was right - then no chance of seeing how far it extended.

We saw nothing on the screen after a 10min sub, so we were close to abandoning the shot

[Tom OD]

3 hours ago, wxsatuser said:

Having not seen this one before I had to look it up.
Quite a few imagers have the same result as Tom and Olly but I did find one by Tony Hallas that has blue arms.

Not wishing to criticize Tom or Olly, I have great respect for their processing prowess but I wonder what causes the difference?

Hi  Mike,

Yes I was just looking up Tony Hallas' image. My first go at this gave a purple / blue spiral arm look. This was the result of the PixInsight Colour Calibration step. The version I posted here, was without that step, and it came out yellow. In a sense I was going down the, "what I thought it should look like" route. Here is the version with the Col Cal step included. I prefer it actually. I only gave the spiral arms a slight boost in the blue, otherwise this is the colour saturated, no other bias towards any specific colour balance. Maybe a little too over saturated in the Golden stars, but I can tame that a bit later.

Tom

[wxsatuser]

I think that has come out quite nicely.
The Ha regions standout better and so do the typical dust lanes we normally see in other galaxies.

[Sam]

It’s looking great now.

[wimvb]

21 hours ago, Tom OD said:

Olly already posted his version on this. My original version came out purple, and looked more like M101. This second version was done without Colour Calibration in PI.

Great image.

Did you try colour calibration with the new photometric method? As far as I know, this uses foreground stars rather than the galaxy itself for colour calibration. If nothing else, it should at least give another possible rendering of this dso.

Happy new year,

[Tom OD]

20 hours ago, wimvb said:

Great image.

Did you try colour calibration with the new photometric method? As far as I know, this uses foreground stars rather than the galaxy itself for colour calibration. If nothing else, it should at least give another possible rendering of this dso.

Happy new year,

Is that a PI tool? I have not tried anyway. 

Tom. 

[wimvb]

1 hour ago, Tom OD said:

Is that a PI tool? I have not tried anyway. 

Tom. 

Yes, it's in the color calibration submenu. It platesolves the image and uses photometric star data for colour calibration. So far, I've only seen one image of ic 342 where this was used.

[Tom OD]

4 hours ago, wimvb said:

Yes, it's in the color calibration submenu. It platesolves the image and uses photometric star data for colour calibration. So far, I've only seen one image of ic 342 where this was used.

Right that's the next step then to do. Thanks for the tip 

 

tom. 

[steppenwolf]

I really like the 'gold' wider field version - quite stunning.

[tomato]

Absolutely stunning images, I have just 4 hrs on this one and a long, long way to go.  I think on reflection I agree with Steve (Steppenwolf) that the golden hue version is my favourite, it reflects the fact we are viewing this galaxy through the veil of our own Milky Way.

[FranckiM06]

It is very nice image and great result. It is advantage when we can have a shots to nice area and dark sky like Olly home.

[Tom OD]

On ‎04‎/‎01‎/‎2018 at 05:18, FranckiM06 said:

It is very nice image and great result. It is advantage when we can have a shots to nice area and dark sky like Olly home.

Yes the dark site makes a big difference when trying to image faint detail, such as this galaxy.

[Tom OD]

Here is the galaxy with 7hrs added Ha. Thanks to Olly for collecting this data.

Tom