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All the material on this website is copyrighted to J-P Metsavainio, if not otherwise stated. Any content on this website may not be reproduced without the author’s permission.

Have a visit in my portfolio

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

NGC 4945, Finalized




NGC 4945, edge on spiral Galaxy in constellation Centaurus.

I was able to finalize this version, since I now have all the needed calibration images, Dark, Bias and Flat frames. This beautiful, large, edge on galaxy is overlooked, since there is two showpieces at neighborhood, M83 and the Centaurus A.

NGC 4945, imaged with a Northern Galactic members remote telescope in Australia,

 Technical details




16" RCOS ja Apogee U9000 camera. 
LRGB combo.
22x300s for the Luminance and 4x300s / RGB-channel . Dark and Flat calibrated.
Raw data is shared by Petri Kehusmaa and J-P Metsavainio

Processing workflow:
Image acquisition, MaxiDL v4.xxx
Stacked and calibrated in CCDStack.
Deconvolution with a CCDSharp, 30 iterations.
Levels, curves and color combine in PS CS3.


Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Final version of M104, the "Sombrero galaxy"





M104, imaged with a Northern Galactic members remote telescope in Australia,

Final version of the Northern Galaxy members remote telescopes personal first light, Sombrero galaxy, M104.
Now all the sub exposures are Dark- and Flat-frame calibrated.

Close up.

Technical details

16" RCOS ja Apogee U9000 camera. 
LRGB combo.
25x300s for the Luminance and 4x300s / RGB-channel . Dark and Flat calibrated.
Raw data is shared with Petri Kehusmaa and J-P Metsavainio

Processing workflow:
Image acquisition, MaxiDL v4.xxx
Stacked and calibrated in CCDStack.
Deconvolution with a CCDSharp, 30 iterations.

Levels, curves and color combine in PS CS3.

Monday, May 24, 2010

M20, the "Triffid nebula", Continues







Less compressed version, please, have a look in my Portfolio:
http://astroanarchy.zenfolio.com/p5990174/h388dbd45#h388dbd45


M20, imaged with a Northern Galactic members remote telescope in Australia,

Impressive instrumentation and great location in Souther Australia under a dark Sky, makes possible to go deep in very short time! Image above has only 70min. total exposure time, Luminance is 25 min.
I'll shoot more lights for this later.

Technical details

16" RCOS ja Apogee U9000 camera. 
LRGB combo.
LRGB-image, Luminance=5x300s Red=3x300s, Green=3x300s and Blue=3x300s . Dark and Flat calibrated.
Raw data is shared with Petri Kehusmaa and J-P Metsavainio

Processing workflow:
Image acquisition, MaxiDL v4.xxx
Stacked and calibrated in CCDStack.
Deconvolution with a CCDSharp, 30 iterations.


Levels, curves and color combine in PS CS3.

Sunday, May 23, 2010

M16, the "eagle nebula" in HST-palette





M16, HST-palette, RGB-stars



Cropped detail from image n HST-palette and with a broad band RGB-stars.


I don't usually like to mix images, made with totally different technique. How ever, it's very common among many astro photographers to mix broad band stars to a narrow band image. 
The reason is, there is no real stars colors in NB imaging and generally stars are heavily suppressed due the very narrow band width used in filters. 
Some times it's a good thing to have little suppressed stars to be able to show the Nebulous better. 


16" RCOS ja Apogee U9000 camera. 
LRGB combo.
H-alpha 5x1200s, O-III 2x1200s, S-II 2x1200s . Dark and Flat calibrated.
Raw data is shared with Petri Kehusmaa and J-P Metsavainio

Processing workflow:
Image acquisition, MaxiDL v4.xxx
Stacked and calibrated in CCDStack.
Deconvolution with a CCDSharp, 30 iterations.










Levels, curves and color combine in PS CS3.
Narrow band lines are mixed to a HST-palette (Used generally with Hubble Space Telescope)
Red=S-II, Green=H-alpha and Blue=O-III


EDIT. 25.05. 2010
All the pure HST-palette NB images are now updated. Stars are redone by using information from all the NB-channels. By this way, Stars are somehow large but overall feel is more natural, than by using stars from the H-alpha channel alone, as I have done before.
My "Tone mapping" procedure is used to make this image, a tutorial for it can be found here:
http://astroanarchy.blogspot.com/2009/04/neaic.html
Since stars doesn't have any relevant color information in HST-palette images, due the broad band nature of Star emission, I have developed a powerful method, Tone Mapping, to process NB images.
Now on I'll add a star information from all the channels, not just from H-a.
I will rewrite the "Tome Mapping" document in near future.


All NB Channels


Channels are "Tonemapped", all the high S/N components = Stars, are removed to build a well balanced color Map.



A Starless "Color Map", build from channels above.