Dave - a very good image indeed.
What strikes me, apart from the detail, is the lack of virtually any gradient or vignetting. You must have them nailed now (is it the 10" Newt that made the difference I wonder?).
Anyhow - good stuff and thanks for sharing.
Dave
Hi Dave,
Well now it's interesting that you should raise that issue. Vignetting is no longer an issue, since I now work entirely with 2" fittings. With that and the chip size, vignetting is a non issue. As for gradients, well as you know working in a light polluted area, gradients are very much an issue which needs to be tackled. Filters such as the Astronomik CLS do a lot to reduce the issue, but of course no filter could solve the problem entirely. I used to use the various gradient tools in maxim, buit the problem is they are pretty hit and miss. Sometimes they do the job perfectly and sometimes they make things worse.
Finally I found a solution which seems to work well 100% of the time. GradientXTerminator by Russell Croman is a plugin for photoshop. It works in a two stage process, first you do a quick run which gets rid of a lot of the gradient, then a second run cleans up the image totally.
If you just download the filter and run it, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was a load of rubbish, but once you read the brief and well written tutorial on his site, the workings become obvious and it is extremely effective.
The luminance of the crab had a horrible gradient from right to left across it. this tool completely sorted it allowing me to bring the background levels up a bit. I always like to see background which is not totally black.
  