Hi Everyone. Astro time has been limited lately but I did manage to shoot (in mono) NGC6744 over 6 nights, mostly under a very bright moon ... one takes what one can get when one is busy
A couple of things:
. The gradients were a post-processing nightmare. I have not been successful in removing all gradients. Lesson: don't shoot under a full moon lol. Actually, I already knew that but thought I'd have a crack regardless
. Some of seti-astro's new PI scripts are awesome, especially auto DBE, star stretch, and 'what's in my image'. If you're not using
them already, give them a try.
. I couldn't get a lot of detail in the outer arms due to the data being swamped by bright moonlight. I did however get enough data to see where the arm is relative to the 6744's satellite galaxy. That was enough to keep me happy.
. KISS. I chose a relatively straightforward workflow in PI and then Affinity Photo ... I've dumped PS after many years as PS/Adobe is a rip-off. In PI, for each channel, I simply reduced the gradient, rounded the stars, removed noise and then combined with LRGB Combo. Removed stars. Then, stretched starless version using GHS and tweaked curves, sat, detail etc followed by recombining with the stretched stars. I had a version of the final image with smaller stars but it seemed bland, so I gave the stars the love they deserve :-)
The attached image is ~27 hours of LRGB data, roughly combined (in APP) with another ~11 hours from last year. Nearly 40 hours is pretty good! Maybe I'll add to it in 2025. Thanks for looking. Alex
