When the home telescope becomes remotely-operated, things start getting interesting
Major props to my wife, fulfilling the role of on-site telescope operator, weather specialist and electrician (yes, of course cables were snagged during meridian flip).
Eagle Nebula (Messier 16 / NGC 6611) is quite low on the sky from my location, so there wasn't much time to obtain data. Nonetheless, I was able to capture 93 Ha, 89
Oiii and 76 Sii subs => 258 acceptable subs, from which I selected 150 subs for processing.
These are the first images after changing the focuser (no more slipping and sagging, yay). Also did sky flats for
Oiii, as otherwise I see a ring after calibration (sky flats helped, but not completely resolved the issue).
Processing took about 1 week of work and involved the narrowband calibration procedure described in LVA (ImageCalibration, CosmeticCorrection, SubframeSelector, StarAlignment, ImageIntegration, DrizzleIntegration), then pre-processing as usual(TM) (Crop, DBE, StarNet++ to get star mask, EZ Decon, EZ Denoise).
After registering each NB channel in linear state, further processing involved MakedStretch, HistogramTransformation and CurvesTransformation to obtain similar mid-points, LinearFit and then Hubble palette ChannelCombination with R = Sii, G = Ha and B =
Oiii. Magenta fringing was applied using the ColorMask script, MorphologicalTransformation and ColorSaturation. Palette adjustment was done with CurvesTransformation on Hue and then SCNR on Green with a factor of 0.6.
Post-processing was done in Photoshop and Topaz Denoise. Starless image was obtained using StarNet++ v2.
Starless version:
Eagle Nebula in SHO from Bortle 8 skies - Starless version
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