I was not very happy with my attempt at the western veil last year so decided to see if I could do better on the eastern veil this time around.

One of my major goals was to see if I could prevent the background from getting that "fuzzy sweater" look that so plagues my images with dense star fields. This time my approach was to do as little to the data as I could and to rely on some useful scripts as well.

I did the preprocessing in AstroPixelProcessor and it did a nice job but it was slow...integration took around 29 hours and this is on a fairly fast system. Adding up all the steps was likely more than 36 hours. Thankfully, most of it was unattended. Still, it was a lot slower than in PixInsight. The result was nice though and the "remove light pollution" tool did a great job.

Once APP was done I moved over to PixInsight:
1. Channel Combination
2. Dynamic Crop
3. Photometric Color Calibration
4. TGV Denoise
5. Masked Stretch
6. Star Reduction Script
7. AdvSharpening Script
8. Curves for contrast

That seemed achieve the desired goal on the background without introducing too many artifacts. I'm not entirely happy with the ringing introduced around the largest stars. I couldn't find a way to prevent it and still do any sharpening with that script. I ended up trying to tone down the ringing in photoshop but I'd have preferred to prevent it to begin with.