Two beautiful little clusters in a sea of Ha.
This has been a good learning project for me. I had originally processed only data from my ASI200MC OSC camera with only a light pollution filter, RGB, but after seeing Andreas
@equinoxx’s incredible
version I put mine in the dumpster. A week later, I was able to capture Ha for this region with my ASI260MM with an Ha filter. The Ha is faint…I really need to capture from darker site instead of my bortle 7 backyard. I tried many unsuccessful processing techniques to combine the Ha to the RGB image. I finally had some success using a modified blending method designed for galaxies with Pixmath using
Amy Astro’s method. The main difference that I used was to remove the stars from the Ha stack (StarExterminator), then aggressively stretch/curves to bring out the faint Ha and then a tiny bit of Topaz noise reduction before blending into the RGB image after masking the stars.
Also, with the 81GT and the ASI2600 I am slightly under sampled which resulted in pixelated blocky stars…not good on star clusters. I first used PS as well as Gigapixel AI to upscale, both helped but I didn’t like the stars. Then I used APP’s drizzle (for the first time) to integrate…resulting in a much better image. I applied deconvolution and at last was happy with the stars. I counted 16 start-from-scratch processing flows 🤪 in Pix to get to this acceptable image. With my skill level and backyard skies I am happy with this result. I set out to achieve nestling these clusters in their seas of Ha. CS on the full moon now...oh well! -john
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