B

Description: Minor noise reduction and background color adjustment.

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C

Description: Tarted up brighter stars, other minor touch-up.

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D

Description: Brightened bigger stars slightly

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E

Title: Complete reprocess

Description: I haven't been happy with the original processing, and I had learned some new things in Pixinsight. Additionally, I am using StarXterminator now, and a lot of my original frustrations were with Starnet's starless result, which had a lot of artifacts.

This is using StarXterminator, calibrated and drizzle integrated in PI, PCC, DBE and more in PI.

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F

Description: Minor star mask artifact touch ups.

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G

Title: Complete reintegration and reprocess

Description: This is my second-and-a-half reprocess of old data with the new tools and my greatly improved Pixinsight processing skillset.

This image had suffered from my basic lack of processing prowess, the lack of star removal software that easily deals with star-rich fields like this, and the fact that I hadn't completely sorted the back focus on my new-at-the-time Starizona Apex S .65x focal reducer, leading to some coma issues in the corners.

In this particular image I experimented with 2x upscaling the image before and after BlurXTerminator. The 2x upscale is a trick that @Adam Block had employed on some undersampled data to help StarXTerminator better recognize and remove stars. What I found is that, at least with my data and the tool settings I selected, BlurXTerminator was better applied before upsampling. I think some slight chromatic aberration in my stars was being amplified by the upscale, and then further amplified by doing the BlurXTerminator. Basically, dealing with the star shape problems using BlurX before upscaling the data was a cleaner result. The corners and chromatic issues aren't perfect, but they are much better than in older iterations of this image.

StarXTerminator then did a remarkable job in removing the stars, especially considering how many stars are in this field.

I am very happy with the amount of dust that 17.5 hours with my f/3.9, 312 mm astrograph Stellarvue SVX080T with the Starizona .65x Apex-S reducer captures. I am fortunate in that I can shoot from my relatively dark skies (Bortle 3ish) without any light pollution filter. I seems like I often capture dust that is lost to narrowband and/or light polluted areas. I haven't seen many other images that capture the dust in the upper part of this image. There are faint traces of dust throughout the field, but I chose to use DBE to minimize that since I preferred a bit of contrast and hadn't "earned" that dust with more exposure time.

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H

Description: Slight Color Noise reduction and background darkening with Levels in Photoshop.

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