Well, we finally had a clear night in Missouri - and it was on a Saturday! This is the first of a few targets that I was able to shoot with the Esprit 80ED. Wind was rather strong (gusts of 15 to 20 mph) and this affected my autoguiding a bit. Deep Sky Stacker seems to smooth this out, but I think the trade off is crispness of the individual stars. Not totally sure about that - just a guess.
I intentionally framed the target off center (Version A) because I have been struggling with a smudge near the center of my subframes. It may be a newer dust particle that my flats are not correcting. It shows up as a bright spot after stretching via curves. I can correct it in PS by using the lasso tool and playing with exposure / gamma. There are also two other smudges that just showed up this week - but appear as darker spots. The same correction technique helps. I will be cleaning my CLS-CCD filter soon and shooting new flats to see if that helps. In the meantime, if any one has thoughts on this, please let me know.
Version B is a crop of version A to center the galaxy.
Versions C & D were processed with PixInsight using Edoardo Luca Radice's basic workflow for beginners.
http://www.radice.biz/articoli/translations/73-pi-processingexamplem8-engThanks for looking!
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