leo triplet Leo Triplet - Needs more data but sure when will that happen?! :P

[Xiga]

I wasn't going to share this, but what the heck. The winter of discontent continues, so i guess even this little data has to constitute an image these days. 

After what seemed like an age of night after night of clouds, we had a rare few hrs of clear skies one night last week. So i managed to grab a whopping 9 x 7 mins of the Horsehead Nebula before it disappeared behind the neighbor's house. I then needed something else to aim for, so i brought up the Leo Triplet Sequence in SGP and managed to nab about 2.75 hrs in total, before the clouds returned. It really, really needs double, if not triple this amount, so i wasn't really intending on processing this tbh. I was really just messing about in APP and PS testing several things out, so there was no proper workflow being adhered to. I took an Auto DDP stretch out of APP and quickly processed it in PS, without much care. I noticed it was lacking in colour, so i thought this would actually be a good candidate to try out some ArcSinh Colour-Preserving stretches, so i took another linear stack and used Mark Shelley's excellent PS method for doing the colour-preserving stretches. Lo and behold, i ended up with a stack that was very rich in colour, so much so in fact that the sky background had also mottled up pretty bad. So i used a mask to only apply the rich colours to the stars and galaxies of the original image, and it made a HUGE difference. It was only at this stage that i suddenly thought i might as well actually go ahead and make an image out of it.

I really want to stretch it more, but it just can't take it. There's just not enough data, end of story. In fact i may have already stretched it too far as it is. The background is a tad lower than i would have liked as well, but it was needed to help suppress the noise. I've ran quite a bit of NR too, more than i'm usually comfortable with, and it's still noisy. I know what the answer to that is of course, more data! ? (not likely). I do quite like the colours though ?

Feedback welcome.

24 x 420s (2.75 hrs)

80ED (x0.85), D5300, HEQ5-Pro, IDAS-D1. 

Resized to 66% to help hide some of the warts! 

[Demonperformer]

Not too bad at all. More data? Well, yes that will help, but when doesn't it?

[Xiga]

19 hours ago, Demonperformer said:

Not too bad at all. More data? Well, yes that will help, but when doesn't it?

Cheers. More data always helps of course. Just frustrated at the lack of opportunity to add to it ?

[Demonperformer]

I'm with you there. I haven't got out at all this month.

[wimvb]

Very good allready. The tidal detail is just showing, and the vibrant colours make all the difference. Thanks for sharing.