M81/M82 (Jeff Donaldson)

M81/M82

This is a reprocess of the same data before, except mostly full frame. Minor crop to remove stacking artifacts. Flats were added this time to eliminate the vignetting issue I had with the last image which prevented me from posting the full frame. I have been doing a lot of research on taking flats and I think I have come up with a way to do it. What I did was buy a 500watt Halogen Light and bright white bristol board and used the histogram of the Canon camera to expose to 50%. I just have to say Lights, Darks and Flats are THE most important frames to take. Not only did the Flats remove the vignetting it actually seemed to bring out more detail in both galaxies. I added a VERY light HDRWaveletTransformation to make the HII regions pop. Also ran a single iteration 4 pass Deringing to bring out the detail in the core, what it did was lower the intensity of the core. I am not using White Masks for everything I do in Pixinsight now. What the mask lets me do is only affect the objects, not the background. This also works with Curves in that you can boost the saturation of the objects in question without boosting the background noise. There is also a Star Mask I can generate too to fix bloated stars, but thats a different day.

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Distribution of astrophotographers

This table shows the number of distinct astrophotographers who have been assigned and IOTD/TP award compared to the total number of images awarded.
	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

Distribution of subject types

This table shows the distribution of awards per subject type, compared to the popularity of images of that subject type.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
Star trails
Northern lights
Noctilucent clouds
Landscape

Distribution of data sources

This table shows the distribution of awards per data source, compared to the popularity of images acquired from that data source.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
Own remote observatory
Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

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Astrometry.net job	n/a
PixInsight job	n/a
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