Yet another M13

[DaveS]

'tis the season.....

This is 90 mins each RGB in 5 min subs building on the test image I did earlier. 130mm f/7 TS triplet Apo, ASI 1600 MMC in Max DR setting, Baader RGB filters. No L used.

Sigma Add stacking followed by basic Gradient Removal. Then Trichromy and a crop to remove alignment edges. DDP followed by another Adaptive Gradient Removal. Histogram Stretch to pull the background down a touch, and hold back the bright core. Gentle Unsharp Mask to define the stars.

C&C welcome as usual.

[Richie092]

Love it. Can see the fuzzies too!

[geoflewis]

Dave, that looks great, the propeller is nicely on show (actually 2 of them), but I think that there is a lot more of the cluster for you to tease out though it's difficult without blowing out the core. I did a more aggressive stretch combining ArcSinH with an HDR prestretch (nthRootX^n) an ImagesPlus tool that stretches primarily for the stars in the outter regions of the cluster, I then took your version and my version and layered them in PS using lighten blend mode so that you less blown core is revealed together with the outer regions of the cluster from my version.

I know that you only ran a few quick process steps to see what you'd got, so I hope that you don't mind me playing, but this is what I extracted using your jpeg, so I'm sure that using the raw files you could get a much better result.

Seeing yours makes me even more determined to take a deeper look at this stunning target with the C14, though unfortunately at that scale I lose the the 2 lovely blue and red guardian stars which I think really completes images of this cluster.

 

[DaveS]

Thanks Geoff.

Very happy for you to have a go with the data. AstroArt doesn't have the ArcSinH stretch tool, though it has a lot of other useful tools. I think I may need to get to grips with GIMP for the layer blend. Hmm....thinking whether a soft mask over the core to protect it followed by the aggressive stretch might work.

[geoflewis]

Dave, just a thought but Mike Unsold the developer of the ImagesPlus software that I use just last week made it free to anyone to download. It can be downloaded from his website at http://www.mlunsold.com/ILOrdering.html

Mike hasn't updated it for a few years, so the camera control software (IPCC) doesn't work with the many of the newer range of cameras, but the calibration, stacking and post processing software (IP65) is still very useful with pretty rich functionality and now being free it might be worth taking a look. I'd be happy to show you the ropes if you're interested, plus there are quite a few tutorials on Mike's website and several youtube videos.....

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwiEwbbkobPpAhWDSRUIHZusDqUQFjACegQIARAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fplaylist%3Flist%3DPLA67311EB96DA663D&usg=AOvVaw1atDc_wdEaFSI5WTd8Ny5D

Again they are old and were done on an earlier version of IP, though mostly relevant to his latest version and good enough to get started.

Edited May 14, 2020 by geoflewis

[DaveS]

Thanks, downloading now.

[geoflewis]

4 minutes ago, DaveS said:

Thanks, downloading now.

Great - I'm be very happy to do a TeamViewer session with you to give you a quick look at some of the tools.

[DaveS]

Hmm...it's asking for a serial number, which I didn't get during the download. will have to think about this.

[geoflewis]

2 minutes ago, DaveS said:

Hmm...it's asking for a serial number, which I didn't get during the download. will have to think about this.

It's on the download page...

CE14EE41-6EE5-4EDD-9A78

Edited May 14, 2020 by geoflewis

[DaveS]

Thanks, somehow I missed it. Dur.....

[geoflewis]

You'll need to 'Run as Administrator' to register it, but then should be good to go....