Hickson compact group 44 WIP

[ollypenrice]

I wouldn't normally post a WIP but I sat down this morning with the data I had and started playing with it. I found it a bit addictive so I'll post what I've got so far. This is TEC140/Atik 460/Mesu 200 data. Lum 8 Hrs in 15 min subs, RGB 8x10. I have 2 hours of red and will take the green and blue to at least that level tonight if it stays clear. I don't think the extra colour will make a lot of difference to the image but it should make it much easier to process and I'm shooting this for a guest arriving at the weekend.  This is cropped and framed to fit the screen. Stacked in AstroArt, alignments in Registar, DBE and SCNR green in PI and the rest in Photoshop CS3.

The lum was taken with Tom O'Donoghue last year, the colour last night.  Nearly two months of  turbulent seeing ended at last. FWHM values were very good.

So Hickson 44 in Leo.

Olly

 

[ian_bird]

Jaw dropping Olly.

[mftoet]

Wonderful group of galaxies!

[Knight of Clear Skies]

Spectacular, the galaxy haloes really make this image as you can see the mutual distortion.

[Tom OD]

Superb Olly.

The background has the silky smoothness I like. Did it need much NR?

The galaxy in the bottom left looks "clean" (not that dirty yellow / brown) with good colour balance. I wondered about the purple hue, but I believe you have nailed it.

Tom

[ollypenrice]

8 minutes ago, Tom OD said:

Superb Olly.

The background has the silky smoothness I like. Did it need much NR?

The galaxy in the bottom left looks "clean" (not that dirty yellow / brown) with good colour balance. I wondered about the purple hue, but I believe you have nailed it.

Tom

Cheers Tom. The background from this camera always needs a tweak. It produces a smattering of over-dark pixels so I pin the curve at the brightest background pixels and above, then lift the curve below that. There was colour noise, too, in the RGB background which I reduced using saturation and colour noise reduction in Ps. I'm just stacking the new colour set with 13x10 mins per colour instead of 8x10 but the sky wasn't as clear for the extra data. I'll see which is best and send you that shortly. I do think the blues are tending to magenta and lessened this as far as it seemed to want to be lessened!

Olly

[x6gas]

Really wonderful image Olly.

[DaveS]

If that's WIP, then the finished image will be amazing