M8 Lagoon Nebula and Surrounding Hydrogen Cloud Ha+OSC RASA8 (Brandon Tackett)

M8 Lagoon Nebula and Surrounding Hydrogen Cloud Ha+OSC RASA8

I became distracted with other targets during Milky Way Season (shark, Lion, Pelican, North America, Iris, and Tulip) that I neglected on getting to the Lagoon Nebula until late in the season. M8 only gets 26 degree above my southern horizon, so I spent 1-2 hrs right at true dark for the 3 weeks with clear nights capture OSC and SHO data.

My goal was to capture all the surrounding nebulosity to the east of the Lagoon with IC 4648 and NGC 6559 as well as the starfish globular cluster in the bottom left. I had previously framed the lagoon with the trifid, but I enjoyed this framing better.

I wanted to capture all the hydrogen emission nebula, but not blow out the core. I used HDR composition to combining the 60 seconds subs with the 300s subs with mostly the desired effect.

This image also is my first attempt at a small star elimination technique that I devised. Often with the RASA8 I get great detail, but also pick of tiny high mag stars that make the image busy/grain/noisy in a lot of the nebulosity. For this image. I used star net to removal the stars. I denoised the starless image using tgvdenoise to removal the small artifacts. Then I created a smooth range mask to remove the smallest tiny stars. I applied the range mask to the star image. Then with the larger stars masked, I used pixel math to zero the rest of image effectively removing the tiny stars. Then I added the new star layer back to the starless image. (see image 2 for a comparison)

I am curious what people think of this method? I would welcome feedback feedback for and against. the technique.

Original
B
C
D
Final
E

B

Description: Example of small scale star removal

Uploaded: ...

C

Description: Just the Lagoon with slight color boost

Uploaded: ...

D

Description: RGB stars placed back in the original image when I had accidently placed grayscale stars. Also, I had forgotten to photometric color calibrate and it caused an incredibly washed out image.

Uploaded: ...

E

Description: Redo Edit with new processing Technique. Less red saturation for better or worse

Uploaded: ...

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5415723
PixInsight job	ZU0IW6N71LHW0RVNSC0RO7NO3RBAS5KK
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	18h05m54s.98
RA (top/left)	18h11m02s.37
RA (top/right)	18h01m05s.59
RA (bottom/right)	18h00m43s.90
RA (bottom/left)	18h10m48s.69

Dec (center)	-24°20′17″.4
Dec (top/left)	-23°29′44″.3
Dec (top/right)	-23°24′37″.6
Dec (bottom/right)	-25°10′07″.6
Dec (bottom/left)	-25°15′25″.6

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