The Antennae Galaxies (NGC 4038/4039) are a pair of colliding galaxies about 65 million ly away. The collision over the last few hundred million years has resulted in streams of ejected stars, forming the 'antennae'. Despite having guide camera issues for the first hour of the night, and horrific seeing/guiding error/HFR values, this somehow turned out decent. I've also made an annotated version which highlights background galaxies in the uncropped FOV.
Captured on April 20th, 2023 from the Deerlick Astronomy Village (Bortle 3)
ArcsinhStretch+HistogramTransformation to bring nonlinear
RGB Linear:
DynamicCrop
DynamicBackgroundExtraction
ChannelCombination
SpectrophotometricColorCalibration
HSV Repair
AcrsinhStretch + HistogramTransformation to stretch nonlinear
Nonlinear:
added stretched luminance to stretched RGB via LRGBCombination
DeepSNR
shitloads of CurveTransformations to adjust hue, lightness, saturation, etc. (some with star masks)
more curves
LocalHistogramTransformation
Two round of this: one at kernel radius 16 for the finer 'feathery' details and one at 200 something for larger structures
SCNR green
CloneStamp to remove one weirdly saturated Ha region (it looked bad)
even more curves
NoiseX
UnsharpMask
curves!
BlurXTerminator (star reduction only)
MLT for chrominance noise reduction
guess what more curves
final curves
Resample to 70%
DynamicCrop again
annotation
Wow, I don’t know what any of this means, but it’s a great shot, and looks like a lot of work went into it. How long did it all take?
It took one night to actually photograph it (drove about 2 hours to a dark site away from the city), and then a few hours back at home to process the pic
The Antennae Galaxies (NGC 4038/4039) are a pair of colliding galaxies about 65 million ly away. The collision over the last few hundred million years has resulted in streams of ejected stars, forming the 'antennae'. Despite having guide camera issues for the first hour of the night, and horrific seeing/guiding error/HFR values, this somehow turned out decent. I've also made an annotated version which highlights background galaxies in the uncropped FOV.
Captured on April 20th, 2023 from the Deerlick Astronomy Village (Bortle 3)
Places where I host my other images:
Instagram | Flickr
Equipment:
120mc290mc for guidingAcquisition: 3 hours 52 minutes (Camera at half Unity Gain, -15°C)
Capture Software:
PixInsight Processing
Luminance Linear:
RGB Linear:
Nonlinear:
Wow, I don’t know what any of this means, but it’s a great shot, and looks like a lot of work went into it. How long did it all take?
It took one night to actually photograph it (drove about 2 hours to a dark site away from the city), and then a few hours back at home to process the pic
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