NGC 488 - Pier 1

Better- less red version done

Hi all

I am sure I can get a little more out of this one ....  however lots of images of this faint beauty are really over stretched and unsensitively sharpened.  Any tips to get further dynamic range here (already used a couple of doses of CLAHE/ local normalisation on the luminance)

I think my stars are a little large - but mainly to show off the spectra on the diffraction spikes of the brighter star HD 8302 at the bottom of the image.

Incidentally is it my eyes  or are the square diffraction elements surrounding that star.   If so what are causing that - or is it my imagination?

 

 

Hi Paul,

very nice image indeed.  Here is my interpretation of the same data.

  Here is my interpretation of the same data.

Love it - how do you get the image so blue? - I  think I am colour balancing a little too early in the process

  Here is my interpretation of the same data.

 

 

Love it - how do you get the image so blue? - I  think I am colour balancing a little too early in the process

Hmmm... I am actually using Astro Pixel Processor for integration and channel combination. In this case I already balanced the channels so that the red contribution is a bit dimmed. After that I go to Pixinsight and process the image by serial stretching, remove the stars and then perform first low pass noise reduction followed by deconvolution. Only then do I push the color saturation etc... Importantly, I use luminance masks (or their inverse) at almost every step from deconvolution onwards.

In some cases a step involving HDRmultiscaleTransform also helps with adjusting contrast and details. I often do this even before color saturation changes.

It seems you are suing a method to work on the Lum only. I have never tried this, but should definitely learn about it ... and then use this for channel combination. 

Cheers

Manuel