This May Be a Record

As I know, I've been working on imaging the Herschel 400 list. I'm now up to 313 of the 400. On the night of May 28,2019, I imaged three galaxies, all on the list, in one image. Cheating, maybe, but they all fit, so there you have it.

The primary target was NGC 4261, but 4273 and 4281 came along for the ride. After processing the image, I counted 15 galaxies in this one image. That is what may be the record. Especially considering that the skies have been, and still are, quite hazy.

NGC 4261, et. al. Posted original size so you can try to find all 15. Vertical line on left is a satellite.

M33 Redo

It would appear that image processing is pretty much everything, second only to everything else. In other words, the data (original image) has to be good to start with, especially in terms of focus, tracking, etc.

As an experiment, or just to try something else to see if I could do better, I took the original data from 2015 on the galaxy M33 and processed using a different method.

The original method was to calibrate the image (flats, darks) for each color channel (L, R, G, B); combine the 4 channels, and then stretch the resulting LRGB image to arrive at the final image, which is shown below.

M33 Original image posted in 2015

All in all, not too bad.

However, doing some reading this weekend, I found a different method of processing the same data. This time, I basically processed only the L channel just as I would have the image above; ie, stretching it, sharpening it, etc. This new L channel was then combined with the RGB channels as before. Only a small amount of stretching and sharpening was done on this image. Indeed, I had to add a little blur to make it look a little better, ie, not so stark. Results below.

M33 Redo sharper and better color saturation, I think

Exactly the same starting images, just processed a little differently. Personally, I like the 2^nd one better.

As as aside, the "count" that blogger supplies for each entry, meaning the number of times someone has seen that page, has officially dropped to 0. Normally, it's 4 or 5. Probably bots looking around. I think I'll look at it after I post this just to get the count up to 1.