Description: This is two nights worth on the Leo Triplet. First night was endless equipment problems, mostly self-inflicted. Second had clouds, and more tech issues which combined to end my Blue capture in the trees on the horizon.

Since the first night had no usable flats, I wound up just stacking the two nights' integrations. I might get less noisy results if I went back, started from scratch, and did them as two sessions in APP. But since I was operating with half the backfocus I should have been, I knew there was only so much I could wring out of these data!

I had a lot of trouble getting a decent color balance in Astro Pixel Processor with this dataset, so I used its light pollution and stretching tools and exported TIFFs. I copied and pasted each of the RGB layers into the corresponding channel in Photoshop, converted the image to Lab Color, and pasted the luminance in as the Lightness channel.

Before I touched anything else, I exported to a TIFF and ran Topaz Denoise AI on that. It did a very good job muting the griblies without giving anything a plastic feel or knocking out detail (Topaz recommends that you run Denoise as early as possible in processing). Back into Photoshop to export an 8-bit TIFF for starnet++ to play with. Pulled the resulting starless layer into Photoshop yet one more time, set it back to 16 bit RGB, and set its blend mode to Difference, producing a stars-only image. Stamp Visible to turn that into its own, stars-only layer. A little bit of contrast enhancement; really, APP's stretch did all the work, I just tweaked a teeny bit.

Then yet another TIFF export, this time for Topaz Sharpen AI. Usually I find the Motion Blur mode works best, but here it was the Unsharp mode. I pulled the slider WAY over, and while the stars went to heck, some really nice detail was extracted in the galaxies, especially in M66. Brought that layer back into Photoshop, added a layer mask, clicked Invert to mask it all out, then drew on just the galaxies with a white brush to pull the sharpened layer forward.

Finally, some Blur and Healing Brush work on the stars layer to ameliorate some of the more egregious haloes and artifacts, a pretty hard Saturation pull to bring up all the star color I could, and a Color Balance layer to get rid of the green stars. Whew!