M16 | Close Up With Good Seeing (Kevin Morefield)

M16 | Close Up With Good Seeing

I'm still collecting data for a wider FOV version of this. The main area pictured here is very bright and doesn't need as much time as the extended emission. My test processing looked pretty good on the bright core so I thought I'd finish it as a starless close up.

Without meaning to, I ended up with a pretty similar image as I did a few years ago, but this one is much sharper. Image scale is .60" - and my subs came in mostly under 2".

There is something about the pillars that really seems to imply sharpness and resolution even when it's not great. Maybe it's the fact that the really small area is also really bright so there is a lot of data for the sharpening algorithms to work with. I pretty much sharpened this with every tool I had, albeit via masks and with care. Deconvolution in PI, Topaz Clear (again Topaz AI just made a mess of things), and little unsharp masking in PS. The most important thing was to keep the sharpening from blowing out those faint details and edges.

With such a close up there aren't 1000's of star left so I removed them with Photoshop fill, clone stamp, and spot healer. This takes about 30 minutes of manual work but you can blink back and forth to make sure odd structures aren't being created.

Fine Art Astrophotography
Narrowband imaging
QHY Users Group

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Deep sky
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Backyard
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Other
Unknown

The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

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Status	Basic failed
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	4809320
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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