TheSkySearchers

Here's my attempt at M81 M82. My Canon 600D field of view is too narrow to fit in both galaxies so I decided to capture the pair in two halves and merge them. I managed 10 x 240 second @ 800iso subs on M81 on the 18th June with 5 x Darks and 20 x Flats. Then 10 x 240 second @ 800iso on M82 on the 21st June with 5 x Darks and 20 x Flats. Both data sets were a bit shy with only 40 minutes each for quite faint targets. So on the 25th June I managed another 10 x 240 second shots of both targets with a set of Darks and Flats.

I stacked all of the 4 sets in DSS (just one frame lost to RBE (Ruined By Elon!)). Then I pulled the four stacked files into Gimp to stretch the curves and levels and pump up the colour and saturation. Two pairs back into DSS to stack together to give two images for stitching in MS ICE. That was an epic fail! ICE wasn't able to find a match. So, back to Gimp to do some clever copy and pasting.





It's a bit over processed, the red is too low, the green is too high and you can see the join but it was a learning experience!

Regards

Graeme

Very nice Graeme!

Sorry to hear about the fail with Ice. You sure managed to manually “stitch” it together nicely though!

Glad that you got some good skies and nice work getting it together for the challenge!

Cheers Jim.

As it turns out it was easier than I thought in Gimp. I opened the two files then opened a new file with an adequate sized canvas. I pasted the M81 image in at one end then pasted the M82 in at the other end, turned down the visibility to 50%, zoomed in and moved the second image to perfectly overlap. Then turned the visibility back up to 100%. Probably should have cropped them both first to make the overlap smaller.

Another aspect learnt!

Regards

Graeme

That turned out rather nicely.

BABO

Very nice image Graeme!