Andromeda

[wimvb]

6 hours ago, rickwayne said:

...5 hours on and the progress bar is at 10%...

I hope you've turned off automatic updates in MS windows. Good luck.

[wimvb]

good news regarding the colour. There is definitely colour in your image.

I combined the R, G, and B masters in PixInsight and cropped to the central area to avoid any frame combination artefacts. Then I applied Dynamic Background Extraction and Photometric Color Calibration. Finally I stretched the image with Arcsinh stretch and followed up with a curves stretch. This is the result.

In my opinion, to succeed with a mosaic, you need absolute control over gradients. This means both during the calibration process and later on gradient removal during post processing. You can't take any shortcuts, because they will show up sooner or later.

 

[rickwayne]

Thanks! I went back and completely redid the calibration and integration, and am now working from a much better baseline. One key was to do light-pollution correction in APP on the mono images, for some reason I thought it only operated on RGB ones. In fact now I have too much color, I have these weird pink highlights along the dust lanes. I mean, it's really pretty but not exactly scientifically accurate!

As for Windows updates -- got you covered there mate, I work on a Mac 🙂

Edited November 23, 2020 by rickwayne