It knew this would happen anyway ...... so I did not resist any longer and searched for and found some professional data free for public use. I'm used to being challenged by processing my own data because they are mediocre at best, almost always lacking integration time due to my location between (
beautiful!) mountains and trees, down in our valley. The weather (clouds and seeing, mostly) change often and the best time of the year to take photos of the night sky is in the middle of the deepest winter, when nights are long, though icy cold but also often dry and clear.
This
Horsehead Nebula (B33 / IC434) from the
Hubble Legacy Archive is my first try processing this kind of data. Of course I looked up a rather familiar and well known object for this purpose. It was interesting and fun using
FITS Liberator first to stretch the different layers individually before feeding them to
Siril for re-combining them back into a single image. After some more tweaking I did the final touch (not too necessary) with
Darktable.
Nothing beats good data to begin with ...
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