M106

[DaveS]

This has been a real fight. I captured lots of subs, but unfortunately a lot after meridian flip had a horrible light leak from the LED floods on my CCTV so had to be binned leaving me with 30 Red, 30 Green, 42 Blue, and 42 Luminance. I started capture on the 19th March, and finished the main capture on the 14th April. I still have some H-alpha which I may or may not att in to the red channel.

Stacked in DSS with Sigma Kappa, Dark, Flat and Dark Flat frames, but no Bias. Many rounds of Gradient Reduction in AstroArt before and after Histogram Stretch, DDP, Colour Balance, RGB assembly, LRGB Synthesis etc.

And a big crop due to severe alignment problems with the camera becoming skewed between sessions.

This is the version without Unsharp Mask, as I think I may have overcooked it and got too much noise. Even in the image of M106 itself there are gradients!

[Adam1234]

Looks nice

[DaveS]

I had another bash. By using a big hammer I was able to include all the data without the horrid light leak causing a problem, so this is now about 6 hours each RGB, plus 13 hours Luminance. Stacked in DSS with full calibration, Sigma Kappa method. Histogram stretch, DDP several rounds of Gradient reduction then Trichromy and LRGB synthesis. More colour Balance and Saturation. oh, and a touch of Unsharp Mask somewhere in the chain.

Now that's odd. The JPEG uploaded looks nothing like it does in AstroArt, or on my monitor.

[DaveS]

Decided to have one final (Yeah, right) bash. Cropped off that nasty light leak and hit it with the big hammer

[Tan Zhi Qi]

Beautiful!