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 bright cluster has around 80 stars embedded in tendrils of hydrogen nebulosity.
Processing details:
Pixinsight: used
pre-processing workflow from LightVortexAstronomy (selected and graded 32 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).
Comments