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Title: M51 - New Post-processing

Description: Hoping it will work as a sort of lucky charm, considering that bad weather has not allowed us to see any star in the sky since several months,
I am reprocessing some images that I made when I still did not know any of the methods I recently learned (Rc-Astro tools, among the others), and also with very short integration time, when at the beginning, the signal-to-noise ratio of an astronomical image was not very clear to me. I do not particularly enjoy reprocessing old images, I would rather take subjects I have already captured, so I hope that the new year helps un in that.
I start with this M51, taken at the beginning of May 2021. In the last year many things have changed in terms of post-processing, and the new methods, if used with "good practice", allow to significantly improve the results. However, what has really changed in my case is the processing time, significantly reduced. To complete the luminance of this image 20 minutes were enough for me, while for the previous version several hours, however quite unpleasant to look at it now. In the description all the details about the tools I have applied.
This image has been obtained with my motorized Dobsonian, with very short exposures of 1.5 seconds, with the previous ASI294MM and MC cameras. Full integration was 15 minutes for luminance (unacceptably short...) and 30 minutes for each RGB channel.


Happy new year to everybody!

Acquisition: SharpCap
Pre-processing: SiriL
Post-processing Luminance: PixInsight (Crop-DBE-BXT*-Stretch-LHE-HMT-NXT**-CT)
*BXT: Sharpen Stars:0.15 - Adjust Star Halos 0.015 - Automatic PSF - Sharpen Non Stellar 0.40
**NXT: Denoise 0.55 - Detail 0.15
Post-processing Crominance PixInsight (Star alignment-DBE-SPCC-Stretch-Conv-NXT-CT) Photoshop (NikCollection-ProContrast + CameraRaw-Vibrance)

Nauris Mirrage 600mm f3,8 - http://nauris.de/index.php/en/telescopes/vates-astrograph
Paracorr type 2
ASI294MM and ASI294MC
Gain 400
Astrodon LRGB filters
Pegasus Astro Falcon Derotator
L 600 best frames over the 900 captured x 1,5 sec (15 min) 03/05/2021
RGB 3600 best frames over the 5400 captured x 1,5 sec (90 min) 08/05/2021
Dark x 100
Resize 60%

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