NGC 3981: Telescope Live

Members of Horizons can download the for the edition of the Cosmic Canvas: NGC 3981- a Windblown Wonder!

In this section I do some final tweaks and wrap up the image at the 85%-90% completion state. At the end of the day, I will probably fiddle with the stars more- but watching me do so for another half hour or more isn't going to be beneficial! :) 

I couldn't stand it anymore. Those crazy stars...I had to do something. Here I demonstrate a technique for painting on an image to create a mask and apply a differently processed image. This is somewhat akin to a "Photoshop" like technique to work with masks. 

In this section a few critical color adjustments are made which set the stage for the final look and feel of this image. 

As a consequence of the previous section- here I commit to creating an LRGB image. Some saturation and color adjustments are made that will hopefully carry forward in the processing. 

In this session I *finally* commit to permanently stretching the RGB and Luminance images. Still, I create a few variations to work with- and in the next section we will decide which is best and move forward (so this section does end on a cliffhanger).

This is the second section on an important adjustment/fix- this time with the RGB data. 

Problems. Problems. This series of recorded processing sessions are truly unvarnished and "as it happens." By leaving the mistakes and less optimal paths, very good learning opportunities that are not found in other tutorials of the type. (Either the sessions are devoid of errors to highlight the technique or... problems are shown without good explanations of solutions.) This is the first of two sections along these lines. 

The RGB is registered to the Luminance and the steps for a reasonable deconvolution of the data are shown. All of these steps are correct... but there are some little monsters that will bite me in the next section. See if you can identify them. 

A few color adjustments are made in this section that hopefully will not be detrimental "downstream." The idea that the spatial information of the color data is not as critical as the luminance. 

A fairly typically application of DBE is applied to the luminance image. An RGB image is created using PCC and that result has DBE applied with the same pattern used on the luminance. 

Each channel is combined and MURE Denoise is applied using the optimum values. 

The RGB data needed a similar treatment as shown in the previous section. Both the central artifact as well as an alignment issue were dealt with. The alignment issue in this case has an error in the console that you will want to look out for. After this section, you will not "freak out" if you do ever encounter it. 

In this section I reveal the solution to an issue I was having with this data. It would not align cleanly. Instead Star Alignment was warping the data presumably due to a distortion of some kind. I show my solution to this issue- which may be a rigorous one if this problem ever occurs again. 

Part 3 of the processing of NGC 3981 concerns dealing with the central artifact that runs through the image vertically. A model of the artifact is created and subtracted from each image. In addition normal cosmetic correction is applied to the images. 

NGC 3981: The modeling of the central artifact. 

The Processing of NGC 3981 data from Telescope Live via the 1m telescope in Chile.