ABSTRACT
The Whirlpool Galaxy is a popular target for astronomers. It is a perfect jewel in the sky; measuring only about ten arc minutes square, it is especially intriguing due to the neighboring galaxy with which it appears to be interacting. A temporary screen stretch of the RGB file showed some worrying color gradients that for some reason had escaped the color calibration tools. Zooming into the image showed high levels of chroma noise too. Cropping removed the worst gradients and the background noise levels were improved and neutralized with noise reduction at a scale of one and two pixels followed by background neutralization. The shadow clipping point was carefully selected in the second pass to clip no more than a few hundred pixels and to set the background level. After stretching, the background noise was subdued a little more with an application of the Adaptive Contrast Driven Noise Reduction tool.
