Last year's M81/82 data reprocessed

[Whippy]

I spent a couple of evenings grabbing a fair amount of data on this (the?) classic galaxy pairing last year but for some reason or another, I never managed to get it looking right despite several attempts at processing (for the original plus all the exposure times etc etc see here: http://stargazerslounge.com/imaging-deep-sky/74147-m81-82-lrgb.html ). So flush from my M106 colour image where I discovered a couple of new tricks, I decided to give this yet another go and I think finally I'm satisfied with it. If I'm being critical I think I've slightly over-sharpened the galaxies which has left a little too much noise but it doesn't look too bad .

Tony..

[MartinB]

Looks good to me Tony, natural colours and doesn't look over cooked

[Paxo]

Looks very good indeed Tony, a worthy reprocess.

Steve..

[barkis]

I have to say they look very splendissimo.

Something quite natural in the look of them too.

Ron.

[Rossco72]

Very nice looking image Tony

[Whippy]

Thanks guys , it's nice when something 'clicks' and you're able to go back to do an image a bit more justice.

Tony..

[adamsp123]

Very nice re-do Tony, a great "clean" image.

[steppenwolf]

Aha, someone else 're-visiting' - this looks very nice indeed, some nice clean colours and detail.

[EA2007]

groovee

could you please give the specs for that shot i.e. exposure times

keep it up.

[Whippy]

Thanks guys .

could you please give the specs for that shot i.e. exposure times

The luminence was 3hrs 6 mins (31 x 6 mins), Red and Green 52 minutes each (13 x 4 mins) and Blue was 1 hr 4 mins (16 x 4 mins). The colour was binned 2x2. All the other info is here: http://stargazerslounge.com/imaging-deep-sky/74147-m81-82-lrgb.html .

Tony..

[EA2007]

Thanks,

Not wanting to sound like a fool here, but those exposure times, are they just random or do you specifically plan to do 31 for Luminance and 13 for R&G etc?

Its a good image.

[Whippy]

TBH, with the luminence I normally try to throw enough time at it to get a relatively smooth image showing most of the details. With brighter objects like these two it doesn't take a huge amount of time relatively speaking for me to be happy with the results but fainter stuff can take a lot longer.

With the RGB, I always used to go with the traditional wisdom that you have to do an equal amount of RGB to match the luminence (albeit binned 2x2 to save time) plus a little bit extra of Blue to counteract the effects of atmospheric scattering. But with a recent session, I decided to do unbinned RGB and only do an hour of each colour (compared to the nearly 5 hours of luminence) which gave pretty good results so I think I'll be doing that in future.

Tony..

[EA2007]

Cool, thanks for that.