Two clear nights in a row was a good kick off for the year and I was able to capture about 12.5 hours of integration time, 11 hours of which I stacked. I had captured a few more hours on this target at the end of December but it was under a bright moon with dodgy skies so I decided to scrap those. 

I still have a lot to learn with regards processing, particularly on the stars which I'm never truly happy with in my images. Currently I remove them early on and add them back in towards the end but I always seem to end up with stars that are a bit fuzzy and that lack colour. I don't know whether that's down to my processing or whether the filter is partly to blame. I see many people take separate exposures for star colour and blend those in, if you have any good tutorials or advice on how to do that that would be great!

I'm far from a processing god but I always find it helpful when other people share their workflows so I thought I would share what I do, maybe someone will find it useful:

Pixinsight:
Linear Stage
    • Apply Background Neutralisation
    • Apply Dynamic Crop to remove artefacts on edges
    • Apply Automatic Background Extraction to remove any gradients (1 or 2, subtraction) 
    • Apply Colour Calibration 
    • Apply SCNR to taste

Stretch the image
I experimented with the SFT stretch, manually via Histogram Transformation  and masked stretch.  With this particular image I preferred the result from the STF (I normally do)

Noise Reduction 

• I followed a Visible Dark YouTube tutorial called 'Knock the noise out of your astro image' It applies TGV Denoise to a non linear image.

    • Split channels 
    • Saved the red and green channels, discarded blue
    • Applied gentle noise reduction to R and G using Topaz
    • Boost brightness of G channel to more closely match the R channel using Histogram and Curves
    • Normally I would use PixelMath to synthesise a blue channel but I didn't like the results this time. For this particular image I used LRGB combination to recombine as follows: L=R, R=R, G=G, B=G. So RRGG. 
    • Ran the 'DarkStructureEnhance' script at 0.2 strength 
    • Import into Lightroom for some adjustments, mainly to colours, contrast etc. 

Star Prep
    • Apply SCNR to star mask
    • Curves transformation to boost colour saturation 

Recombination with stars
    • PixelMath: starless+0.7*stars

Final sharpening
    • I apply a small amount of sharpening using another Visible Dark tutorial 'Enhanced luminance sharpening in PixInsight'


Nothing special but maybe that will be useful to someone, if anyone has any processing tips for stars they're happy to share that would be great. 

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