M33 / NGC 598 / Triangulum Galaxy

[rjbokleman]

I'd taken a shot at this target when I first started with my Canon T5i, but gave up quickly due to how dim & difficult this target can be from a Red/Orange zone. Fast forward a year with more learning, the same scope [Sky-Watcher 100ED Pro (Doublet)], but this time with a mono camera (ZWO ASI1600MM-C) made all the difference.

With 13.8 hours of Ha/OIII/LRGB data, and 3 days spent processing this, I was able to tease this target out of hiding using PI. Enjoy!

[Stargrrl]

Very nice Ron - lovely detail in the spiral arms. Thanks for posting! Rebekah

[Pete]

Holy smokes Ron. It was just yesterday that you were struggling with the basics and now you're at the very top of the game. Wonderful.

Pete

[Chuck]

Hi Ron:

Great to see you back. Awesome shot and the NB filters really enhanced the color in the image.

I've been trying to find the time with good weather to image M33 myself. Here is a test shot I did in mid-November. My original intent was to get a few hours on it but the seeing was horrible so I just took 10 minutes.



Hopefully I'll get another chance to try again before my western obstructions are in the way. I think I'll try for a couple hours without any filter and a couple hours with my astronomic UHC clip filter to enhance the Ha and OIII regions.

Thanks for sharing.

---- Chuck

[AndyG]

Beautiful image, Ron. Great job on the processing.

[rjbokleman]

I see that folks have begun sharing their pre/post processing sequences. That's a real challenge to write up in a single post, so instead I'll generalize that I've been using the process outlined by Kayron Mercieca and his blog: Light Vortex Astronomy http://www.lightvortexastronomy.com/ with some tweaks of my own.

I personally don't use the PI BatchPreprocessing script and prefer doing these steps ~manually~ as I acquire my data. That's not to imply there's anything wrong with the Script --> Batch Processing --> BatchPreprocessing technique.

I say manually simply because over time I've created a set of Process Icons that are saved off and are loaded during specific steps to reduce the overhead. Those Process Icons are setup for specific things like Master_Dark_ImageCalibration_with_Master_SuperBias.xpsm, or MultiscaleLinearTransform_NoiseReduction.xpsm making processing much less of a pure task. During processing when doing things like a DynamicCrop across all filters (which needs to be 100% identical) I'll even save one off with my target name like NGC7023_Iris_Nebular_Dynamic_Crop.xpsm in case I want to add data a year from now and not have to start at the very beginning again.

Another, somewhat recent resource, is the book by Warren Keller entitled Inside PixInsight. I've read through it and while it's getting positive reviews on Amazon....I personally have found it a real challenge to make sense of. In my humble opinion it is nowhere as clear, clean or sequentially understandable as Kayron's work referenced above.