| Here is an urban shot
that has much more effort
invested in the processing than the image capture. With the evenings
getting shorter I'll have to start shooting the same target over
multiple nights to get the kind of exposure needed to bring the faint
detail out from my light polluted urban skies. Due to the shorter
exposure and insufficient dithering, there were light pollution bands
and blotches throughout the shot. Fortunately Images Plus has a great
band removal that works well on these types of issues. M106 is a spiral galaxy in Canes Venatici, near the Big Dipper, and because of its relatively large size exhibits rather low surface brightness, making it a difficult target for the urban imager. According to Wikipedia - Messier 106 (also known as NGC 4258) is an intermediate spiral galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici. It was discovered by Pierre Méchain in 1781. M106 is at a distance of about 22 to 25 million light-years away from Earth. M106 contains an active nucleus classified as a Type 2 Seyfert, and the presence of a central supermassive black hole has been demonstrated from radio-wavelength observations of the rotation of a disk of molecular gas orbiting within the inner light-year around the black hole. Click on the image to see a higher resolution version, click again to return to this page. |
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| Here is a very simple processing of a two hour subset of the same data to show the light pollution banding that was removed using the Images Plus band removal tool. This tool is a little tricky to use and its simplest application tends to leave dark bands radiating from bright things in the image or a gradient across the image that is brighter in the middle and darker at the edges. There is a simple, but tedious method to get around both of these artifacts and the above image shows results. | ||||||||||||||||||||
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