Title: IC342 - The Hidden Galaxy Reprocessed
Description:
This is a reprocess of IC342.
In the original version, I made an attempt to estimate the color as if the galaxy wasn't obstructed by dust, but I was never really happy with the result.
Since that version, there have been two very important updates for PixInsight and available plug-ins. First, the PixInsight team released the new SpectophotometricColorCalibration tool. And second, Russ Croman released the (amazing, imo) new BlurXTerminator plug-in.
Since SPCC came out, I was planning on redoing this one, but abandoning the idea of "fixing" the color, and just going with the color as it appears in the sky, and not trying to recover the blues and other stuff affected by dust. When BlurXTerminator came out, I decided it was time.
Since moving to the east side of the mountains two years ago, I have been happy with the clear nights (I have *lots* of still-unprocessed data to work through). But the seeing is significantly degraded from what I used to get on the west side of the mountains. After some initial experimentation with BlurXTerminator, I believe that it might just give me an edge to recover some of the resolution that I lost moving over here, and this is an excellent image to demonstrate that. Switching between the original and new version shows the effect of poor seeing, and how BXT helps to mitigate it.
As long as I was going with the natural color, I also wanted to try and bring out some of the dust that affects it. It's quite pervasive in the area, and is visible in the background sky of this new version.
So this is a nearly complete reprocess. I started with the same integrated masters, but processed everything else from scratch using the newly available tools.
I am much happier with this result.
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