Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Ursa Major (UMa)  ·  Contains:  M 109  ·  NGC 3992
M109 Experiment with Gain Zero, Andy W
M109 Experiment with Gain Zero
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M109 Experiment with Gain Zero

M109 Experiment with Gain Zero, Andy W
M109 Experiment with Gain Zero
Powered byPixInsight

M109 Experiment with Gain Zero

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

This is my first result from using Gain Zero with the 294mm. I live in Bortle 7/8 zone so I've been battling gradients using unity gain.
It might be the way to go but I need to do some changes in processing Unity Gain to be sure and get a one to one comparison.

RBG - ~1.5 hours each
L - 4 hours

Summary - I can obviously improve the detail by adding more luminance time which I will do. Maybe 10 total hours to see what it looks like.

IMAGE CALIBRATION (PixInsight)
Weighted Batch Preprocessing
- Lights, Darks, Flat Darks
- Cosmetic Correction
- Drizzle processing to create L,R,G,B images

LINEAR PROCESSING (PixInsight)
1. Alignment of LRGB drizzle images
2. Dynamic Crop of LRGB images
3. Automatic Background Extraction of LRGB images
4. SCNR to remove green.
5. RGB Channels were combined with ChannelCombination
6. Color Calibration applied to the new RGB combined image.
7. Background Neutralization applied
8. Photometric Color Calibration applied

Non-LINEAR PROCESSING (PixInsight)
1. EZ Denoise script applied to Luminance image.
2. EZ Soft Stetch script to stretch the image.
3. Used Histogram Transformation to brighten the galaxies.
4. Starnet++ to remove the stars and create a image of the stars
5. HDRMultiscaleTransform can be used to compress the dynamic range of a High Dynamic Range image and show the galaxy core more.
6. (Starless Image) Used Curves to enhance the galaxies.
7. Used Pixmath to even out the background (iif($T<med($T),med($T),$T))
8. (Starless Image) Used Local Histogram Equalization to increase contrast (25)
9. (Starless Image) Used Local Histogram Equalization to increase contrast (75)
10. (Starless Image) Used Multiscale Linear Transform to sharpen the gaalxies.
11. Added stars back to the image using Pixel Math.
12. Used convolution to blur the RGB image
13. used LRGBCobination with just the Luminace to the RGB image
14. Boosted galaxy brightness and saturation using Curves
15. Exported image to TIF for TopazDenoise AI run.
16. Imported back into PixInisght and saved
17. Made image ready for the web using ICCProfileTransformation

Comments

Sky plot

Sky plot

Histogram

M109 Experiment with Gain Zero, Andy W