The Beehive in RGB-only (no L) prepared for Cloudy Nights' Goofi's Imaging Challenge, March 2022.
6hr total integration, 2hr each RGB. Taken over 4 nights, Mar 6-9. 30sec at unity gain.
(Update: apologies - previously misstated at my usual 60s. This was 30s exposures, to reduce saturation in the bright stars. Hence 6hr total integration, not 12.)
It's seldom I take pictures of open clusters, so this was a good experiment to get good star color and pick up a few wonderful faint fuzzies that I would never have dreamed were there when I was a kid when I first got enchanted by the stars.
There was also a bad light flare problem from a nearby bright star, which I fixed with Starnet v2 and Content-Aware Fill on the background-only (NOT the stars, so fully-preserving the stars). v2 was much more effective than v1 on this object, where the object is the actual stars rather than the usual nebula.
More on the flare fix here:
https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/814542-m44-challenge-techniques-and-progress-discussion/?p=11785812Goofi's challenge:
https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/814538-goofis-imaging-challenge-march-2022-m44-beehive-cluster/The object:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beehive_Cluster
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