M3 - acquired with Betas!

Managed to nail the focus with the RCT and produced this over the last few weeks. Also managed to find a way through for repeatable and reliable deconvolution in Pixinsight.
It’s been done to death over the past but I was particularly pleased to expand the extent of the cluster with more exposures and developing a superlum - a combination of the luminance filter exposures and the luminance information from the RGB exposures.

5 Likes

Wow!
Well done Buzz.

Mark

Wow!
Nice Job.

Leandro

Fantastic image!

Very nice Buzz. I look forward to seeing your documentation of the superlum process you developed.

I cannot claim credit for inventing it - I think it was thought of before but not well documented. It just struck me as an idea and the PI gurus confirmed it made sense and had been tried before.
Simply put, if we do LRGB imaging and use LRGBCombination, we throw away the luminance information in the RGB image. It just occurred to combine all four stacks to form a superlum. Since all the stacks already had their outliers rejected, I just weighted their combination according to their noise level with ImageIntegration.
My noise levels dropped dramatically when I did it on M3 since I had an equal number of 5-minute subs for each filter. If you use RGB sparingly, as many do, the benefits will be less significant. (edit - it also helps if they are all at the same binning level too.)

The documentation will be included in Edition 2 of my book. I’m hoping to get enough image acquisition to support a publish date of 2018

That is very good.
Can I ask. Just out of interest. What imager you use?

Hi Paul - I’m using a QSI 683 wsg - cooled to -10C. LRGB 33x300 seconds each. 10" GSO truss RCT on a Paramount MX, TPoint/ProTrack but with autoguiding every 10 seconds. Oh yes and using a different version of SGP each night. At one point, I had more iterations of SGP than I had clear nights. No wonder Ken was reaching the end of his tether :wink:

Processed entirely in PixInsight.

Thank you Buzz.

It looks like you have a good setup, that is working well.