While trying to get back into the hobby and considering changing setups I have been inspired to reprocess some of my old data.
This was with older less-narrowband filters which certainly make things a bit harder. Also the CGEM DX did not track/guide well at all. Nothing like my Mach1GTO.
I did the removal of stars, noise reduction, combine Ha and O3 for a SHO/HOO-ish look. Copy the O3, stretch to use as a mask, curves tweaks and saturation boost w/mask for the blue, invert mask for the rest, remove mask for final tweaks. Using starnet 2 generated masks and playing with morphological transform to knock the stars down, especially because they looked bad due to the wider bandpass filters and poor mount tracking.
I am also tending to mess with deconvolution, HDRmultiscale, LHE, and the other sharpening type tools. I really like to get a sharp image but I am finding with this 80mm at 2.04"/px (and especially when I had bad tracking/filters) the detail just isn't going to be there and I end up doing more harm than good. It seemed with my 8in RC at 0.69"/px and Mach1's tracking I could do a little sharpening work with good results.
I am fairly surprised with how much better this turned out over my previous attempts.
First attempt in 2017
https://astrob.in/302585/P/Second attempt in 2019
https://astrob.in/388537/C/I also have the wild starless version. After the curves would process the preview would show what it would look like if I processed the same settings again... thena gain. It looked like this crazy fire/water contrast. I thought it looked cool. It didn't look good when I added stars.
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