M81 (Bode's Galaxy), M82 (Cigar Galaxy)

[rjbokleman]

We had a very nice time observing together Saturday night @ Presidente's invitation. Got some help from Andy G. and began imaging M81/M82. Departed around 2:00am with 125 images to process. Still climbing the curve here, but thought I'd share the preliminary results...out of pure excitement.

[Pete]

That's beautiful Ron. Whatever happened to the learning curve?

Pete

[Apollo XX]

Wow! Awesome!

[rjbokleman]

Thanks, Pete and Mike. Well...the image lacks color at the moment.

Still trying to understand how to bring that out..if it's there. This was 125 x 30" exposures or about 62 minutes. I was expecting to see some tiny hint of color present. However, I've been looking at several other examples today with around the same exposure times and some even at 174 minutes and they're mostly black & white.

It appears that you'd have to expose these two for well over 4 hours or perhaps add some kind of filter(s) to get some color out of them, but I've asked Andy to take a look at my original .tiff files from DSS to see if that's true.

For example, Jerry Lodriguss [http://www.astropix.com/HTML/SHOW_DIG/M ... laxies.HTM] has an beauty of these two, but if you read the fine print he's done over 8 hours of light gathering with multiple cameras and some filtering.

[Pete]

Exactly which camera were you using Ron? Assuming that you're using a color camera, either you processed this as a luminance frame or you had your camera set to black & white. If yours is a color camera you can't help but not have a color image unless you defeat it. Even with short exposures.

Pete

[rjbokleman]

It was my Canon T5i, so it should have some color in it. I wasn't shooting B&W on purpose. The trick now is to figure out how to pull the color back out of the .tiff with better post processing. See...that learning curve is still there!

[WCGucfa]

Aw shucks, Ron, I just KNEW you were faking that learning curve thing!!
But then again, maybe Andy is a genius teacher!
Maybe those white spots on Ceres is a Walmart!

Bill G.

[Bruce D]

That's a keeper Ron! Glad you came over!

[DonB]

Very nice image.
Don

[rjbokleman]

Bill,

Couple of things. I noticed today that the T5i has the option to set the RGB to Adobe RGB (probably 1998) and [default] sRGB. The camera has been in sRBG. I read the July 2015 S&T article entitled 'Done In One' by Warren Keller and grabbed a copy of AstroArt 5.0 Demo Edition.

I followed the post processing steps outlined in the article and have another go at this. Thing is...it couldn't get the Debayer matrix to align with my image. Nothing I selected was correct, so my guess is that sRGB isn't the proper setting for taking photographs that you want to post process. Instead you need to flip this into Adobe RGB mode and then more than likely things will align properly. This is only a guess on my part, but reading the T5i manual concerning Color Reproduction Range[Color Space]:

The range of reproducible colors is call the color space. With this camera, the color space for captured images can be set to sRGB or Adobe RGB. For normal shooting, sRGB is recommended. About Adobe RGB: This color space is mainly used for commercial printing and other industrial uses. This setting is not recommended if you don't know about image processing, Adobe RGB, and Design rule for Camera File System 2.0 (Exif 2.21 or higher). The image will look very subdued in a sRGB personal computer environment and with printers not compatible with Design rule for Camera File System 2.0 (Exif 2.21 or higher). Post-processing of the image with software will therefore be required.

Anyone know if this setting makes for better post processing or any difference at all?

What did I get out of AstroArt 5.0? Well, it's got more color than before, but I lost the center of M81.