Probably should've gotten more exposure time on this, but it was already way out of season. Captured over several nights in January 2024, from a Bortle 9 zone
Places where I host my other images:
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TPO 6" F/4 Imaging Newtonian
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Orion Sirius EQ-G
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ZWO ASI1600MM-Pro
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Skywatcher Quattro Coma Corrector
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ZWO EFW 8x1.25"/31mm
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Astronomik LRGB+CLS Filters- 31mm
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Astrodon 31mm Ha 5nm, Oiii 3nm, Sii 5nm
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Agena 50mm Deluxe Straight-Through Guide Scope
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ZWO ASI-290mc for guiding
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Moonlite Autofocuser
Acquisition: 10 hours 10 minutes (Camera at -15°C), Camera at unity gain.
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Ha - 35x360"
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Oiii - 31x360"
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Sii - 35x360"
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L - 200x120"
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Darks- 30
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Flats- 30 per filter
Capture Software:
- Captured using N.I.N.A. and PHD2 for guiding and dithering.
PixInsight Preprocessing:
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BatchPreProcessing
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StarAlignment
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ImageIntegration per channel
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DrizzleIntegration (2x, Var β=1.5)
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Dynamic Crop
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DynamicBackgroundExtraction
duplicated each image and removed stars via StarXterminator. Ran DBE with a shitload of points to generate background model. model subtracted from original pic using the following PixelMath (math courtesy of /u/jimmythechicken1)
$T * med(model) / model
**Narrowband Linear:
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Blur and NoiseXTerminator
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Duplicated the images before stretching to be used for separate stars-only processing
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STF applied via histogramtransformation to stretch nonlinear
Stars Only Processing:
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StarXTerminator to make stars only image form each channel
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PixelMath to combine star images (SHO palette)
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SpectroPhotometricColorCalibration (narrowband working mode)
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SCNR Green
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ArcsinhStretch + HT to stretch nonlinear - to be combined later with starless pic
Nonlinear:
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PixelMath to combine stretched Ha, Oiii, and Sii images into color image (SHO palette)
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Invert > SCNR > invert > SCNR to remove greens and magentas
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Shitloads of Curve Transformations to adjust lightness, hues, contrast, saturation, etc
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LRGBCombination with stretched Ha as luminance
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more curves
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NoiseXterminator
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LocalHistrogramEqualization (at small and large scales to target varying structures)
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MLT for large scale chrominance noise reduction
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Extract L --> LRGBCombination for smaller scale chrominance noise reduction
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Pixelmath to add in the stretched stars only image from earlier
This basically re-linearizes the two images, adds them together, and then stretches them back to before
(Jimmy is a processing wizard when it comes to writing up this independent starless processing stuff)
mtf(.005,
mtf(.995,Stars)+
mtf(.995,Starless))
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more curves
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Resample to 60%
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Annotation