Whale and Hockey Stick Galaxies (RGB) (Linda)

Whale and Hockey Stick Galaxies (RGB)

Link: https://lindasastronomyadventures.space/?p=11213

Finally an image from home after months of lots of other things getting in the way. I've been able to get most of the tilt out of the system but some still remains. So far any adjustments I make from here make things worse so I need to think about how to take things. At the moment though it's usable and BlurXterminator makes it almost but not completely unnoticeable.

This was from one night of imaging and a good chunk of that night was spent doing the tilt adjustment and making sure that everything was running well. The system still needs some optimization but that can wait for a clear but moonlit night. It's definitely usable as it is.

The image is of the Whale and Hockey Stick (sometimes called the Crowbar) galaxies in Canes Venatici. It still never fails to amaze me that amateur equipment can capture details in galaxies that are 30 million light years away!

Processing was as follows:

Each R, G and B:
DBE

RGB:
channel combination
blurXterminator
SPCC
(made a clone of the image for star processing)
GHS (GHS color, linear, GHS color)
starXterminator
noiseXterminator
LHE
curves (contrast)
color saturation (slight boost to orange for the core of the Whale)
MLT (very mild sharpening)
histogram transformation (touch more contrast tweak)
curves (very slight color boost)
a bit more noiseXterminator
pixel math in stars (screen)

stars:
run star terminator extracting screened stars while linear
GHS
SCNR
unsharp mask (very mild sharpening)

I seem to get a better result on the background of the main image if I extract the stars after stretching but I also wanted to do a linear stretch for the stars which is why I made the clone after color calibration.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	7385780
PixInsight job	AXLAEGR2ELGO5B6DS3Y30B0U60LL1QL5
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	12h43m00s.302
RA (top/left)	12h46m05s.925
RA (top/right)	12h39m54s.780
RA (bottom/right)	12h39m55s.935
RA (bottom/left)	12h46m04s.460

Dec (center)	+32°19′24″.63
Dec (top/left)	+32°46′01″.89
Dec (top/right)	+32°46′00″.90
Dec (bottom/right)	+31°52′29″.45
Dec (bottom/left)	+31°52′30″.66

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