Initially shot for obtaining star colors for a narrowband image, I noticed interesting structures and details even in this OSC image shot with the Nikon Z6, so I decided to fully process this stack. Subs were taken on the morning of 5 January, from Runcu Stone, a hilltop with an altitude of ~850m ASL having Bortle 4 class skies.
This nebula located at around 10,000 light-years from Earth is a star-forming region in the Perseus galactic arm.
Processing details:
Pixinsight: used
pre-processing workflow from LightVortexAstronomy (selected and graded 53 frames), then crop, DBE with tolerance 1.6, DBE again with tolerance 0.8, BackgroundNeutralization. ColorCalibration, SCNR (green), EZ Decon, EZ Denoise, MaskedStretch, HistogramTransformation with CIE-L mask to recover contrast, CurvesTransformation with CIE-L mask to improve saturation, CurvesTransformation with inverted CIE-L mask to desaturate background, ACDNR with inverted CIE-L mask to remove some large-scale noise structures
Photoshop: minor edits to remove dust specs which weren't removed from flats, curves (slightly improve contrast), Hue/Saturation (fix magenta cast), Saturation (slightly increase vibrance).
Credit goes to
@stille for managing to fix the color calibration and showing me new techniques to manage color and background noise.
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