M81 reprocessed

[discardedastro]

After the comments on my previous attempt...

I figured it'd be worth reprocessing the data with a bit more care and patience, to see what I could achieve.

I took a lot more care in blink/subframeselector, combined some 300s and 60s luminance subs to generate a HDR composite for luminance, deconvolved that (poorly, I think, but it's not abysmal - having all sorts of fun trying to avoid regularization issues, and you can see some artefacts in the core/arms despite masking), and combined with my RGB stacks. Photometric colour calibration, SCNR, MLT denoising, TGV, histograms, LRGB combination, a little saturation tweaking, local histogram equalization, and unsharp mask to finish.

Quite happy that I've managed to sharpen up and improve the detail in the arms/core a bit, but still not 100% happy with the deconvolution result. There's also some issues in the top left/bottom right corners where the two nights of data overlap with different rotation. I considered mixing in the reasonable Ha stack I managed but it's also rotated thusly so was struggling to incorporate it in a way that looked at all natural, so left it out.

I think any further improvement will require more data - here's hoping the weather calms down a bit next week!

[Sunshine]

Big as life! amazing, nice detail in those arms.

[x6gas]

Very nice work and a marked improvement over the first process, which had itself result in a lovely image.  You've managed to control the core in this version and as before I like the natural-looking result very much.

[niallk]

One of my favourite galaxies 

[cliveharriesdeepsky7]

lovely image nice detail