Who wants to help me get the most out of my image?

[glennbech]

Here is a 15mb TIF, that is a stack of around 14hrs of 10 and 15 minute subs.

http://bechonjava.squarespace.com/storage/astro/m8282.tif

Who wants to have a play with processing? It woud be interesting to see what you can get out it :-)

[Euan]

I will give it a go

[Euan]

I'm struggling a bit with the noise, also the band across the bottom really needs some Photoshop skills. That new content aware fill would sort that would no bother, I don't have it though

[johnrt]

Here's my version of your image. All the leg work is done in PI

Hope you like it.

[glennbech]

That looks good john, It's very crisp and sharp :-) I have to take a look into pixinsight.

[glennbech]

Euan; I think I neded up cropping the line out. I Think I have to go through all of the 71 images in the stack and weed some out.

[harry page]

Hi

Ran it through pixinsight , For the amount of time you have on this it is very noisey indeed and was heavy on the noise reduction

Could get it better with a little more practice but you get the idea

Harry

[Whippy]

Just for grins Glenn, a bit of photoshop thuggery. Not that I spent loads of time on it, but that background was proving to be a real pain! The colour balance isn't great either but that's not one of strong points! I also cheated and cut that bottom off.

FWIW, despite their relative brightness, these two are quite tricky to get a decent image of so IMO, you haven't done too badly at all .

Tony..

[Tim]

I'll have a go, but i'm curious as to why the tiff is so small?

[Tim]

OK, have taken a quick look.

Can you do me a favour, if you use DSS to stack, can you drag a box around the two galaxies, give them a bit of context, and then stack 2 x drizzle with Auto adaptive or median sigma stacking method.

Then, upload the 32bit Autosave file that it produces somewhere.

Cheers

[Tim]

Here's a quick shot at the file above. Lots of that noise which seems peculiar to Canon's, very evident in the red channel. Bit of muck on the sensor too by the look of it, shows as a blob by m81.

When you go through the images, ditch any with clouds or higher background levels than the average, or any with obvious anomalies.

As mentioned above, M81 requires different treatment to M82 really, and so to get them both in one frame, and not spend half your life processing them, is a bit of a trick The image isn't too bad at all, but for 14 hours, i'd have expected a LOT smoother noise wise.

Cheers

[Earl]

Here is my play for you

[glennbech]

Hi Earl :-) Great effort!

TJ: As mentioned above, M81 requires different treatment to M82 really, and so to get them both in one frame, and not spend half your life processing them, is a bit of a trick The image isn't too bad at all, but for 14 hours, i'd have expected a LOT smoother noise wise.

When looking at the data more carefully, I see that I have some funny flats in one of the groups. I probably have to go back and stack all three nights individually and look at the quality of each night. You're right about the noise, Since this is my longest stack so far, It is worth aiming for for the best possible result. Have to do my homework again i Guess.

Thanks for the comments and suggestions!