HCG 44 LRGB

[DaveS]

Hickson 44 or the Leo Quartet from my ODK rig.

This is 5 hours Bin 1 Luminance plus 2 hours each Red and Green, and 3 3/4 hours Blue in Bin 2 and G2v calibration for a total of 12 3/4 hours. Not nearly enough.

Stacked in AstroArt 8, Sigma+Add with full calibration then each stack cropped and reduced gradient. 

Luminance given a hard DDP with High Pass filtering to bring out differences in brightness, then a Richardson-Lucy deconvolution.

RGB stacks upscaled to match the luminance then given a soft DDP with no High Pass. Then a light denoise.

The individual RGB plates were co-registered with the the Luminance before being combined into a RGB plate. This was given a modest Saturation Boost and a slight Hue adjustment before LRGB synthesis. There were also several crops to remove alignment edges.

This is the whole image, a cropped and rotated version is in the Galaxy Cluster competition. Yep, there are some dodgy star cores (From the High Pass DDP). Nope, I can't be asked to "fix" them.

Edited April 3, 2022 by DaveS
Typo in title.

[DaveS]

Looking closely at the brighter stars especially I can see some red - green fringing due to slight errors in the RGB alignment before Trichromy. I've been cheating the alignment by a pixel here, a pixel there but it's proving fiddly and tricky to get it "just so".

If I *do* manage to solve the problem I will post an update.