M63 revisited with modern software...

[ollypenrice]

M63 is a flocculant (as opposed to 'Grand Design') spiral with faint, extensive tidal streams. The imager foolish enough to obsess over bringing out these tidal streams  will find himself spending hours and hours attempting to do so without running himself out of dynamic range for the rest of the image...  BlurXT was good for the galaxy but Star XT wiped out too many of the small galaxies which abound. In the end I was able to use the StarXT version just to enhance the tidal streamers.

This is LRGB, 25 hours of CCD data from the TEC140. I reckon this is a target for the RASA, this year.

 

Olly

[Laurin Dave]

Fabulous image Olly, what a difference these new tools make, not only do they improve the result I find they also save a bundle of time... Just as well as I now need to re-process all my data!  I love the tiny, halo free stars with better colour and background galaxies seemingly popping out of nowhere. The edge on spiral  in this image really stands out behind M63, sharper and deeper colour than your previous process.  My Ha data on galaxies seems to particularly benefit from the BXT,SXT, NXT treatment

Dave

[gorann]

Beautiful! Never seen so much tidal streams around this galaxy. As you indicate, the RASA may find even more. Mi impression has been that StarXT is quite good at not moving galaxies to the star layer but keeping them in the background layer, so you were probably unlucky this time. Did you try Starnet2 on the image?

[callisto]

Very nice indeed 👍

[ollypenrice]

46 minutes ago, gorann said:

Beautiful! Never seen so much tidal streams around this galaxy. As you indicate, the RASA may find even more. Mi impression has been that StarXT is quite good at not moving galaxies to the star layer but keeping them in the background layer, so you were probably unlucky this time. Did you try Starnet2 on the image?

This is a field particularly full of tiny, hardly-resolved galaxies so I think it was a difficult one for StarXT.  It did spare some of them but I felt the image lost too much of its character without the rest.  Since there are no really bright stars, and not many moderately bright ones, that I could reduce them manually fairly quickly. I don't have Starnet2. However, the very clean, smooth starless layer was good for lifting the tidal streams smoothly.

There are a few other galaxies with tidal streams which would be worth trying in the RASA.

Olly

[DaveS]

Oh my word! I have never seen even a hint that there are tidal streams like that around M63.

[ONIKKINEN]

Beautiful image all around, rich background, extensive tidal streams and of course the galaxy itself.

On StarX removing background galaxies, you could add them back to the starless layer from the stars only layer. Takes a bit of manual work with the eraser to remove the objects not wanted in the star layer. Then just subtract that layer from the original star layer and you're left with a layer that contains only the background galaxies. Now you can do with them as you please or add them to the starless layer for some extra work. Easy to do in PS, just takes a while with a background as rich as this!

Actually you could do it the other way round too, removing all the objects that are actual milky way stars and then do the layer shuffle. Might be easier in very rich background images.

Edited March 2, 2023 by ONIKKINEN

[ollypenrice]

4 hours ago, ONIKKINEN said:

Beautiful image all around, rich background, extensive tidal streams and of course the galaxy itself.

On StarX removing background galaxies, you could add them back to the starless layer from the stars only layer. Takes a bit of manual work with the eraser to remove the objects not wanted in the star layer. Then just subtract that layer from the original star layer and you're left with a layer that contains only the background galaxies. Now you can do with them as you please or add them to the starless layer for some extra work. Easy to do in PS, just takes a while with a background as rich as this!

Actually you could do it the other way round too, removing all the objects that are actual milky way stars and then do the layer shuffle. Might be easier in very rich background images.

I did start doing this, in fact, but there were so many that I got fed up with it! Since the stars weren't very big anyway, I decided to use StarX only for the tidal extensions.

Olly

[ollypenrice]

Just for info, an all-new RASA 8 image has gone much deeper than this.

Olly