NGC 3718, NGC 3729, and Hickson 56 with 2.5 more hours and some colour added

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Managed to get about one hour's worth of luminance, and 30 minutes in R, G, and B, each (2x2 binned), and added this to the data from Wednesday night, with the stallwart Meade SN-6 6" F/5 Schmidt-Newton and ASI183MM-Pro and ZWO 8-position EFW. The result is a clear improvement on the earlier attempt. Still a long way to go however. I found the best way of adding the colour into the luminance data was to decompose the RGB into HSL channels in Gimp, and replace the L channel with the Luminance data. I could perhaps create a weighted sum of t he L channel of the HSL decomposition of the RGB data and data captured with the L filter. This is the first time I combine luminance data with 2x2 colour data.

[MartinB]

Looks great Michael, nice subtle colour so your method has worked very nicely, the dust lane shows very well.

[Mr Spock]

A lovely image 👍 I'm not familiar with this object though - looks like there might be more to the outer spiral? 

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

3 hours ago, Mr Spock said:

A lovely image 👍 I'm not familiar with this object though - looks like there might be more to the outer spiral? 

It is far more extensive, when skies clear again I hope to get a lot more data, and when our curfew ends I can even get the data from a properly dark site. 

[ollypenrice]

That's going really well. It's lovely and smooth and the arms will grow with more data.

Olly