M20 (Trifid) detail Stars-B-Gone (Michael Southam)

M20 (Trifid) detail Stars-B-Gone

I've been meaning to remove the stars and so reveal the full nebulocity detail in one of my images for some time. Unfortunately the data my equipment captures is not clean enough to allow for any of the automated star removal scripts offered by Pixinsight or PhotoShop so the removal has to be done manually, star by star. The disadvantage is that the process is very time consuming. The advantage is that I get to decide what color to replace each and every star with based on the nebula that surrounds it. This is the first shot I have taken with good enough quality data to devote the required time to remove the stars manually. The starless image reveals much nebula detail than cannot be seen in the original image. That said it looks quite artificial so I had to add the stars back as an overlay to persuade myself that the nebula didn't change during the star removal process. I've included both images here as an animated gif so you can see the same. I also included the original stared and starless images in higher resolution for reference.

Final
Original
C
D

C

Description: High Res with stars

Uploaded: ...

D

Description: High res without stars

Uploaded: ...

Imaged with APT
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Status	Basic failed
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	3815780
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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