M81 and M82 with addtional data and better processing

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

I have a grand total of 174 minutes (just shy of three hours) after weeding out all the subs wrecked by poor tracking, and processed the data a bit differently. I took the unstretched stack from APP, applied colour noise removal from FITSwork, then applied curves in GIMP for initial stretching, in which I leave the background pretty bright. I then increase saturation, and only do the final stretch on the image afterwards, allowing me to add saturation to the objects without blowing up the colour noise in the background. Oh, and I remembered that GIMP tends to flip the image vertically, when importing these FITS files, so I undid that.

I hope to get another hours worth of data at least, in particular to the left of the image

 

[teoria_del_big_bang]

A very nice image, a bit more data and that could be really nice 🙂 

Hopefully a clear night here tonight, which in the north of England have been pretty not existent this year so desperate for some distraction from the current situation (just for a few peaceful hours anyway 🙂 

I may well be on the same target as well, hope you get some more data  soon 🙂 

Steve

Edited March 22, 2020 by teoria_del_big_bang

[mackiedlm]

Thats an excellent image. well done. What scope and camera?

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

1 hour ago, mackiedlm said:

Thats an excellent image. well done. What scope and camera?

I used a Meade 6" F/5 Schmidt-Newton, GP-DX mount, and ASI183MC camera.