NGC 7331 and Stephen's Quintet

[Rodd]

Trully not quite finished, but I think it holds up for the most part.  The problem is there is a huge imballance in data.  There is almost 7 hours of red, but only 2 hours of blue (green 5.6 hours).  I think the 9 hours of luminance really helped.  But the color palette is still off....at least it seems that way to me.  I manipulated the histogram in efforts to improve the color balance as best I could.  I know the background looks dark--but the numbers indicate its in the appropriate range.

The big question: do you think collecting more blue to ballance out the palette will markedly change the image?  I know the red ring at the edge of the core of NGC 7331 is a bit loud--I think due to the palette imbalance. 

TOA 130 with .99x flatener and ASI 1600 Red 203 120 sec; Green 170 120 sec; Blue 64 120 sec; Lum 556 60 sec. (about 24 hours).

[TiffsAndAstro]

looks pretty incredible from here as it stands

[Rodd]

58 minutes ago, TiffsAndAstro said:

looks pretty incredible from here as it stands

Thanks Tiff.  This happends every time I process early, befroe all data is collected.  Its hard not to process what I have when two weeks of Moon and no doubt clouds.  I guess I should be more patient.

[Elp]

Patience is the key. I check my stack after every session but avoid doing any processing until hours have accumulated or until it isn't practical to image the target any more for the season.

[Rodd]

2 minutes ago, Elp said:

Patience is the key. I check my stack after every session but avoid doing any processing until hours have accumulated or until it isn't practical to image the target any more for the season.

It’s hard to not process what you have when you staring down 2 weeks of Moon and/or a week of clouds!

[Elp]

Just now, Rodd said:

It’s hard to not process what you have when you staring down 2 weeks of Moon and/or a week of clouds!

It was much worse during spring and early summer, this year and last year. Literally 6 months of not being able to do anything.

[Rodd]

29 minutes ago, Elp said:

It was much worse during spring and early summer, this year and last year. Literally 6 months of not being able to do anything.

Yeah, I am hoping the improvement Ive seen over the last couple weeks continues.  I just had 6 staight nights.  A week before, a couple.   Fingers crossed

[AstroMuni]

Thats a lovely image @Rodd with lots of detail. A bit more blue may help bring out the finer detail in the galaxies.

[Rodd]

3 hours ago, AstroMuni said:

Thats a lovely image @Rodd with lots of detail. A bit more blue may help bring out the finer detail in the galaxies.

Thanks. Yeah, I probably should have waited

[Rodd]

The stars are embarassing-not only becuase of the color imballance, but they look like featureless flat discs.  I have looked through some of my orevious images and the stars were much more realistic.  I followed the same processing routine.  At any rate--I imptoved the stars and background (not so dark).  the star colors are still a wee bit off I think, but their profiles are improved.

[Clarkey]

Very nice!

23 hours ago, Rodd said:

The big question: do you think collecting more blue to ballance out the palette will markedly change the image?

I don't think so. I have a very similar image and the colour does not seem far off. Also, looking at my version, the stars are a bit 'plain', so I don't think it is you.

[Rodd]

12 minutes ago, Clarkey said:

Very nice!

I don't think so. I have a very similar image and the colour does not seem far off. Also, looking at my version, the stars are a bit 'plain', so I don't think it is you.

Thanks, Clarkey.  I am beginning to think you are right.  Although, using the 10 sec sub stacks to recover clipped stars may improve the stars a bit, the larger ones anyway that are clipped.  I have the green and red 10 sec stacks, I just need to collect the blue.  If I do that, I might as well collect an hour or 2 more blue as long as I am shooting 10 sec blue on the image.  But it has become much less pressing thanks to your comment, and I can succumb to the siren song of other targets that are calling.

[AstroMuni]

1 hour ago, Rodd said:

The stars are embarassing-

They look perfectly fine to me. Did you use the Luminance data to add the stars?

[Rodd]

5 minutes ago, AstroMuni said:

They look perfectly fine to me. Did you use the Luminance data to add the stars?

I did use luminance and did not remove the stars before adding it.  I have done that in the past so that the lum only goes into the targets, but when I inspected it I learned that the lum did not really impact the stars.  I suspect there is an algorithm in the LRGB combination tool that accounts for this.  I could be wrong, though, and just got lucky the time I inspected the stars!