NGC 4395, 14 million light years away and powered by a super-massive black hole. But I was reading that the super-massive black hole is small. I should put "small" in quotes because it is small for super-massive. (I mean, who isn't?) The mass of the black hole is only — "only" — 300,000 times more than our sun.
I took this image over two nights, where I separately shot with color filters, hydrogen-alpha filters, and then black-and-white "luminosity." 320 separate frames, each two minutes exposure.
Ha, L, R, G, B- Weighted Batch Preprocessing
- Dynamic Crop
L- GraXpert to remove background gradient
- BlurXTerminator
- NoiseXTerminator
- HistogramTransformation to make non-linear
- StarXTerminator to move stars to another file
- RangeSelection to create two masks: a broader one with most of the galaxy, and a narrower one for just the core of the galaxy
- LocalHistogramEqualization with the broader mask, Radius=64, Limit=1.5, Amount=0.74
- LocalHistogramEqualization with the narrower mask, Radius=38, Limit=1.3, Amount=1
- UnsharpMask using the broader mask
- PixelMath to bring stars back: ~(~$T*~L_stars)
Ha- GraXpert to remove background gradient
- BlurXTerminator
- StarXTerminator - discard stars
- NoiseXTerminator
- HistogramTransformation to make the image non-linear
R,G,B- ChannelCombination
- GraXpert to remove background gradient
- ImageSolver
- SpectroPhotometricColorCalibration
- HistogramTransformation to make the image non-linear
- Convolution to blur everything and remove color noise
- LRGB Combination to apply L, with Saturation set to around 0.35
- Repeat LRGB Combination to further increase saturation, this time applying Chrominance Noise Reduction
- Apply broader range mask to show only bright galactic core
- PixelMath to screen in Ha:
R: ~(~$T*~(0.8*Ha))
G: $T
B: $T
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