M101

[wimvb]

No astro darkness here yet, but I watched a few new PixInisight videos (https://www.youtube.com/@PixInsight) with techniques that I wanted to test. I downloaded the data from the videos, courtesy Hellas Sky in Greece (https://hellas-sky.com/), and gave it a go.

Processed in PixInsight, with all the XT tools. I find that StarXTerminator doesn't really work well for galaxy images. In my own images, it interprets many small background galaxies as stars, and in this image, it interpreted HII regions as stars. But I wanted to keep the stars small, and overall it worked ok.

The data was collected with a PlaneWave CDK-17 on a 10Micron GM3000 mount, and a QHY600 Pro camera. The Ha and RGB data showed the camera read pattern, so it's a bit underexposed. There were also traces of walking noise. I guess that is the result of not guiding and not dithering. Overall, the data was of good quality. The total integration time was 11 hours according to the fits headers.

[ONIKKINEN]

Nice M101.

StarXterminator turns into galaxy exterminator with sharp datasets, like this one.

What i do in Photoshop is add the removed galaxy detail from the star layer back into the starless layer or its own layer just using the subtract and add blend modes. Essentially creating an image with 3 layers, Milky way stars, Stars or starlike detail of the galaxy and then the starless layer which is just the nebulosity and dust lanes. I think you might be able to do something similar with masks or the clone stamp tool in Pixinsight, but not sure how much effort that would take.

[wimvb]

2 minutes ago, ONIKKINEN said:

Nice M101.

StarXterminator turns into galaxy exterminator with sharp datasets, like this one.

What i do in Photoshop is add the removed galaxy detail from the star layer back into the starless layer or its own layer just using the subtract and add blend modes. Essentially creating an image with 3 layers, Milky way stars, Stars or starlike detail of the galaxy and then the starless layer which is just the nebulosity and dust lanes. I think you might be able to do something similar with masks or the clone stamp tool in Pixinsight, but not sure how much effort that would take.

Thanks.

Your recipe would be too much work really, in PixInsight. As I only did minor tweaks between star removal and star insertion in this image, a fix wouldn't have made much difference anyway. As for my own galaxy images, where very often whole galaxies are treated as stars, I hardly ever remove stars. Nebula images are a different matter.

[tomato]

Great colour rendition👍🏼