Trial of Lightbuckets and PixInsight on M31

[old_eyes]

Two experiements in one. Interested to see what people think.

M31 taken with Lighbuckets remote telescope in New Mexico 12/01/2011.

Astrosysteme 8 inch Newtonian astrograph f3.5 with Apogee Alta U8300 camera - 1.54 arcseconds/pixel.

10 x 120 sec Luminance binned 1x1, 8 x 120sec Red and Blue binned 2x2, and 7 Green (focus failed on one).

Processed in PixInsight following Harry's beginners tutorial workflow and process.

So first time with a remote telescope and first time processing with PixInsight in anger.

What do you think?

old_eyes

[dlp]

Nice!

Think you could improve it with a couple of applications of HDR wavelets, a masked saturation increase, and a slight increase in blue using the mask. Subsequently, with reversed mask, a slight pull down on the red and slight increase in green on the b/g. I'd then move over to PS and try a high pass (about 40px) on a duplicate layer and set to soft light, adjusting opacity to taste.

Just my six pennorth!

David

[old_eyes]

OK - I'll give that a try. Already used HDR wavelets, but perhaps too cautiously. What leads you to identify imbalance in teh background? What are the clues?

old_eyes

[dlp]

It's difficult to make a mask that completely excludes the b/g, so when you adjust curves I think you'll then need to readjust the b/g using the reversed mask. As it is I think without any adjustment your b/ g is pretty neutral.

Edit: use the cursor tool on the b/g to read rgb values