M81 and M82

[JohnH]

I have been sitting on this data since November last year. Every time I tried to process it the background became filled with a kaleidoscope of bright colours (probably not helped by clouds coming over during Green and Red captures) I have finally managed to tame them but I have left the background too dark. I processed in a mixture of Pixinsight and Affinity Photo 2 (with sharpening from Topaz Sharpen AI).

I am concerned that I did so much with masks etc to remove the background that the result is no longer real - not helped because something in the processing has eaten a lot of my stars.



This is slightly cropped from the original.

Details:

Sharpstar 15028 HNT (150mm aperture, f2.8 )
iOptron CEM 25P
ZWO EAF (focusser)
ZWO Mini Filterwheel
ZWO ASIAir Pro

R - 45 seconds x 34
G - 45 seconds x 15
B - 45 seconds x 60

Ha - 240 seconds x 20 (used as Luminance)

Processing:
Calibrated, aligned and stacked is Weighted Batch Preprocessing (Pixinsight - PI)
Ha - BlurXTerminator (PI)
Dynamic Background Extraction (PI)
NoiseXTerminator (PI)

RGB - Background and noise removal as above.
Channel Combination (PI)

SpectroPhotometric Colour Calibration (PI)

StarXTerminator

Galaxies - CloneStamp to remove colour gradient (PI)
ArcSinh Stretch (PI)

Transferred to Affinity Photo 2 (AP2) for colour enhancement

Stars - ArcSinh Stretch (PI)

Transferred to Affinity Photo 2 (AP2) for colour enhancement

Layered "Add"

Exported to Topaz Sharpen AI

JohnH

[JohnH]

Just out of interest, I cropped M82 and fed it through Topaz Gigapixel AI to enlarge it x4. I suspect that there are artefacts and it was imaged before I had a major go at collimating the scope but here it is:



This image is reduced to1024 pixels wide for this page, the original is 1787 pixels.

Yes, I know it is over the top, I cannot help it! 

JohnH

[Carole]

It's a real struggle to image broadband targets from Bromley.  Not sure how well Ha would work as luminance. 

However considering, it has not come out too bad.

There are definitely artefacts in the separate M82. 

Carole