I just can't leave this data set alone!  I processed my previous version of the Great Barred Spiral (NGC 1365) just before Russell Crowman's BlurXTerminator (BXT was) released. I had tried and tried to extract more image detail from my first processing effort but eventually I just couldn't take it any further.  Once I tried it, I realized that BXT is a major advance in deconvolution and I think that Russell's solution to the problem of deconvolution is revolutionary.  I've been super busy with an optics conference so I didn't have much time to reprocess my image but I finally found a way to get it done and I really like the result!  I liked it so much that I decided to give it its own separate image posting in my gallery.  As I recall,  I might have only done this one other time.

Of course the big question is how well does BXT do at sharpening, noise control, and accuracy.  On first inspection, sharpening and noise control look excellent.  To get an idea of accuracy, I took my BXT sharped integrated Lum image and compared it with Hubble data for the same object.  The HST data that I found only covers the core and I found that the image itself was oddly distorted relative to my data.  I tried using Star alignment in PI to register the two frames but after multiple failures, I finally gave up on that idea.  In the end, I simply aligned the two images in Photoshop using my eyeball.  Since the comparison was with my Lum data, I converted the HST data to grey-scale and tried to roughly match the brightness and contrast of the two image regions.  The result is show below.  Even though my registration effort wasn't perfect, you can pretty clearly see what details were recovered.  The HST data clearly shows that a few regions that look like single stars in my data are actually star clusters, but that's not surprising given the additional resolving power of HST. Clearly, my 20" scope didn't record as many faint stars as Hubble but that's also due to the much smaller aperture.  BXT produced stars with a FWHM of just under 1.0" as measured with the FWHMEccentricity tool.  Overall, the detail recovery provided by BXT looks superb and I see very few artifacts left over from the processing.   Russ deserves an award for this work!  I am super impressed.



In the end, I am much happier with this result than I was with my previous effort.  Given the better image sharpness, I was able to crop the frame a bit tighter.  Hopefully it works on your monitor as well as it does on mine!

John