Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Cygnus (Cyg)  ·  Contains:  52 Cyg  ·  HD197395  ·  HD197550  ·  HD198198  ·  HD198330  ·  HD198425  ·  HD198482  ·  HD198550  ·  HD198626  ·  HD198627  ·  HD198820  ·  HD199055  ·  HD199220  ·  HD199317  ·  HD199837  ·  IC 1340  ·  LBN 191  ·  NGC 6960  ·  NGC 6974  ·  NGC 6979  ·  NGC 6992  ·  NGC 6995  ·  PK072-07.1  ·  Sh2-103  ·  The star 52 Cyg  ·  Veil Nebula
Cygnus Loop: The Death of a Giant, astro_kieran
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Cygnus Loop: The Death of a Giant

Cygnus Loop: The Death of a Giant, astro_kieran
Powered byPixInsight

Cygnus Loop: The Death of a Giant

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

A challenging target from a post-processing perspective, as this is an area I am not experienced in. Even with 7 hours of data I found it hard to tease out the details and reduce the noise caused by the volume of stars.

I tried both Star Reduction and EZ Processing Suite but both impacted the nebulosity of the image, so I split the stars out and chopped out the data using histogram transform.

A brief run-down of my PixInsight process can be seen below:
  1. Weighted Batch Pre-Processing with 2x drizzle to solve for under-sampling.
  2. Dynamic Crop and Resample so the processes don't take hours to complete!
  3. Image Solver and Spectrophotometric Colour Calibration.
  4. Auto-Dynamic Background Extraction, excluding areas of nebulosity (a tool from Seti Astro).
  5. StarXterminator.
  6. NoiseXterminator on the starless image.
  7. SCNR to de-green the starless image.
  8. Histogram transformation on the starless image, a mask and then curves on the saturation to make the dust pop.
  9. Histogram transformation on the stars to reduce their quantity and intensity.
  10. PixelMath to recombine the stars to the base image: ~((~Starless)*(~Stars))

Comments

Sky plot

Sky plot

Histogram

Cygnus Loop: The Death of a Giant, astro_kieran