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M33 in LRGG (My first astro image ever - all done in PI)

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alvinjamur:
I'm stoked!

This is my very first deep sky image where I did ALL of the image processing
with nobody holding my hand. I feel like a kid that just learnt how to ride a
bike for the first time. And for the first time, I was able to do ALL off the
processing of astronomical data in a fiendishly clever and brilliant piece of
software called Pixinsight.

I chose the data that my scope collected for M33 (also known as NGC 598), a
spiral galaxy located approximately 3 Million light years away in the constellation
Triangulum.

The Red, Green, Blue and Luminance channels have 16 sub-exposures each
of 600 secs. In other words, the image has total exposure time of 10 hrs and
40 minutes!!

The image took me about 7 hours to process (in one long OCD fueled sitting
with two breaks to walk/train my buddy, Pi). That time will shorten as I get to think
about some of the stuff I did and learn PixInsight better. I'm positively sure that
there are a whole bunch of technical deficiencies in the image and I hope to
rectify those as I develop techniques and my knowledge and skill level grows.
Many thanks to all the helpful people that carry on a conversation and share
knowledge on the PinInsight forums.

The image below is sized 1440x900 as that's the resolution I use for my screen
backgrounds...ie. very cropped from the original 4096x4096

:-)))

- aLV

 :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D

Josh Lake:
Nicely done! And welcome to the club... now that you've started 'riding your bike', it's going to be very hard to want to do anything else, including 'cleaning up your toys'.

Can I ask about workflow? What Kind of history does this image have? Which tools did you use?

I ask because my own workflow changed recently when Vicent Peris posted his Youtube tutorials on processing NGC 1808, another big galaxy. Although I had made some successful images, I'll admit that I didn't really understand the color calibration steps when the image is linear, the logic of using the Screen Transfer Function to make the transition to a non-linear image, and when to use certain tools.

After I saw it, I went back and worked on a few of my older images, and the new results were invariably better. So I was wondering if you could post processing steps and details so we could see the differences between the workflows.

Congrats again, and welcome to the next level of astrophotography.

dayers:
Congratulations on a great first effort! Just think of all the fun that lies ahead!  I too would be interested in learning about the steps you went through to get this beautiful image.

Dave

alvinjamur:
I followed Harry's processing video of M106 to the T (TY Harry!!) -- coupled that with reading
up on so many details on these forums. I have a background in time series signal processing
so went back and read up some stuff on wavelet transforms etc., A good general place
to learn about wavelets is :  http://users.rowan.edu/~polikar/WAVELETS/WTtutorial.html

What makes PI so special, and at the same time hard for a beginner is that it has a lot
of knobs that you can tweak about until kingdom come. I will go back and work the data
and undo some things.....will post steps soon...

TY!!

- aLV

Josh Lake:
Yes, the knobs and sliders are overwhelming for the beginner, especially in tools like DBE. I think that's probably a shared experience with all of us. One great thing is that the defaults often do a nice job for many tools (as Harry is often quick to note), and the ability to operate on Previews in a test/undo loop  or a range of previews is incredibly handy. My processing now feels far less arbitrary than it ever did with other tools -- there is a logic to each step and a quantifiable way of going about it.

Anyway, yes, please post steps, I'm curious as to which tools brought out your galaxy's central region that way.

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