Chuck Hards said: <How do you keep the brighter portions of galaxies (such as nuclei) from <becoming overexposed blobs? This ruins a lot of otherwise good images. Hi Chuck, Thanks for the encouragement. More often than not, the center of the galaxy is not blown out in the original data, but gets destroyed by the processing. The key is to be careful not to saturate the image completely during data collection, and then to carefully process the data, using levels and curves, so as to bring out the detail in the dim areas without washing out the brighter portions. Curves allow differential processing of bright and dim areas, which makes it possible to maintain detail in both. The key to processing is that you must never force anything, that wasn't pure white to begin with, into becoming pure white. I am working on a color version right now, using some crappy old color data. I will post it soon. Cheers, Tyler PS - I'm off to Florida on Friday for 10 days of flyfishing for bones and tarpon. I'll be thinking of you poor saps..... NOT! :) _____________________________________________