I have often admired NASA's beautiful image of the
Pillars Of Creation, and have been looking forward to imaging this amazing structure using the Askar 130PHQ.
Although the nebula surrounding the Pillars is commonly known as the
Eagle Nebula or the Star Queen Nebula, I prefer to call it
The Creator's Hand, because of its striking resemblance to a hand reaching out to clutch the pearl-like HIP 89743 and other stars in the nearby open cluster.
Conditions last weekend were excellent, with good transparency and moon at only 7%. Unfortunately, a lot of dense, patchy, low-level cloud rolled in, and worsened as the night went on. I managed to capture only 28 subs, of which 12 were unusable, leaving only 16 subs to process.
Each image was dithered, so I drizzled the integration x 3 to enhance fine detail. Background noise was reduced using NoiseX, then I used StarX to create separate images of the starless nebula and just the stars. Star profiles were refined using BlurX, then both images were exported for subsequent processing.
After importing the images into separate layers in Affinity Photo, I applied a small amount of Gaussian Blur to soften the star boundaries, then adjusted levels and curves to harmonise the layers before combining them to create the final image.
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