We have a Winner!

We had a great response to the New Year image processing  competition, with a total of 21 entries, all of which were to a very high standard.

In the end, there could only be one winner and Harry Page has decided that the crown should go to:

Steve Benz

Congratulations to Steve and very close runner up, Rafael Rodríguez.

Harry has taken the time to explain his decision below:

Hello fellow imagers,
I was very pleased to be asked to judge the processing entries for the quality data provided by Lunatico and of course even with the same data every entry was different .
Combing narrow band data with RGB is very subjective and offers many choices of colour pallets and combination methods, IMO none are wrong and while this gives great creative choice we must try and respect the data (Ok a pixinsight saying).
I enjoyed viewing everybody’s entry but in the end I ended up with a final two potential winners.
First up, entry number 002.jpg:
The small to medium star handling here is done very well keeping a good colour and retaining a nice stellar shape – even though cyg 52 is perhaps a little overdone losing a bit of that natural look. The nebula itself looks very fine retaining all the highlights and details in the original data and the background has a nice balanced colour.
Second up 005.jpg:
This image is a little softer than the first , with small and medium stars not quite as compact- but this may mean why cyg 52 has a better look to it.
The image has been processed to get the most depth out of the data and shows more faint nebula than any entry, the Ha has aided in this, adding good colour and definition.
So who wins it’s a case of six of one and half a dozen of the others – both are excellent in different ways, but I will give it to image 002.jpg for retaining the details in the nebula.

We’ll be publishing a selection of entries to the competition on our new Instagram account on Monday, so look out for that.

In the meantime, here are Steve and Rafael’s images…