SMC and NGC 104 area (Scotty Bishop)

SMC and NGC 104 area

Here is the SMC and NGC 104 area using data from the Telescope Live AUS-2-CMOS sets and from the old AUS-2-CCD sets to get some of the SHO mixed in properly, plus some of the color to expand the image both up and down some. What came out was a monster file, and I mean 14000 x 18000 size. Needless to say I had to cut that down some. Still, it is cool to count all the globs and nebulae here in this!

The image mix in APP was LRGB each at 100% no multiplier, Ha at 100% red with a 2.500 multiplier, Oiii at 100% green and blue with a 2.500 multiplier, and Sii at 50% green and 100% luminance with no multiplier. After cropping it and saving it as an unstretched tif I imported it into Photoshop and stretched it enough to start bringing stuff out, then pulled a cloned image into another Photoshop tab, removed the stars, evened out the background, then stretched the Ha and Oiii portions, then I recombined it into the original one as an 80% opacity screen layer, and after flattening it i finished things up. Keeping the core of NCG 104 from completely blowing out was a real challenge, especially when the dead center was clipped hard so I had to use clone stamp for a faux center. This is honestly a challenging set with fast optics and most exposures at 300s or 600s when that part probably should be 120s or less.

This was taken using the Telescope Live AUS-2 telescope over a period of roughly 3 years. I did this as a mosaic in APP and then finished it up in Photoshop. Due to how APP integrates and scales the lower quality to the higher quality stuff the final integration was over 250 megapixels! It was a huge file to work with, and when I finished the processing I had to reduce it because the original un-cropped and full size was right at 3.1gb, which is a huge image file.

It was a challenge to process due to the size and due to how the mosaic was structured, but it turned out decent enough. I could have pulled more background out of it, but that ended up almost overwhelming the image when I did so, and for the sake of maintaining the focus of what I wanted for the image I dialed it back some. Looking at the un-cropped full size with it stretched was an image you could get absolutely lost in and I may revisit that.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	8344915
PixInsight job	JNOFX7TZY2GDACHPFLS4ZJYIIAA2909W
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	00h52m53s.60
RA (top/left)	01h25m29s.33
RA (top/right)	00h21m10s.15
RA (bottom/right)	00h12m08s.55
RA (bottom/left)	01h32m33s.41

Dec (center)	-72°39′38″.4
Dec (top/left)	-70°30′52″.5
Dec (top/right)	-70°24′44″.6
Dec (bottom/right)	-74°24′49″.9
Dec (bottom/left)	-74°30′42″.3

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