M31 Mosaic with some colour

[tomato]

This is my best attempt so far after following some sound suggestions from fellow imagers on SGL with regard to gradient control. I can get a half decent result now in Lum and seemingly on each of the RGB channels, but I still am struggling to combine them and get a good result. You will see a host of oversaturated red stars in the top left and a marked predominance of blue ones on the right, dear oh dear...

Capture details:

12 panel mosaic total 48 hrs integration (but only 4 hrs per panel)

Each panel 24 x 300 secs Lum, RGB each 8 x 300 secs, captured with a Esprit 150 dual rig and KAF 8300 CCD cameras, Baader LRGB filters, Mesu 200 mount.

Thanks for looking

 

 

[geordie85]

1 hour ago, tomato said:

but I still am struggling to combine them and get a good result

Maybe you're trying to push the data too far?

[simmo39]

yep, i agree with above.

[tomato]

You maybe right, but a 60 min integration of M31 with my RASA 8 and a Atik Horizon OSC produced “correct” colour in abundance, so I thought the colour shouldn’t be this difficult to achieve with the mosaic?

[tomato]

So I binned (as in threw away) the RGB mosaic data (only 24 hrs worth and 16 sessions, but who's counting?) and used 3 hours of OSC data from the 268c and RASA 8. The FOVs did not overlap fully so I have colourless stars in the top left and bottom right. I have a better Lum file than the one I used here so not finished yet.

[tooth_dr]

7 minutes ago, tomato said:

So I binned (as in threw away) the RGB mosaic data (only 24 hrs worth and 16 sessions, but who's counting?) and used 3 hours of OSC data from the 268c and RASA 8. The FOVs did not overlap fully so I have colourless stars in the top left and bottom right. I have a better Lum file than the one I used here so not finished yet.

That is a lot of waste with the RGB   

The image scale is pretty awesome, but it's a shame it hasnt worked out the way you had intended

[tomato]

Needless to say I haven’t actually deleted the data from the hard disk, and I might return to it at some point to try and  find out what’s wrong. It was shot at the same time as the Lum data so it’s probably my so so processing skills.

One idea I will try is capturing RGB on one Esprit with the 268, alongside the other capturing Lum with the KAF 8300, the imaging scales are not too dissimilar if the OSC is binned, should save a bit of time refocusing.

[tomato]

One more offering, cropped to letterbox format so that my colour data covers all the FOV.