From our vacation on the wonderful island of Rügen I have also brought a few beautiful pictures of the summer Milky Way.

This first picture consists of 180 frames each 10s, because I only had a tripod and my astromodified Canon 700D with me.

The picture was taken at Cape Arkona. In the foreground you can see the Peilturm Kap Arkona (positioning tower). On Wikipedia you find the following information:

"The Peilturm Kap Arkona is a former radio direction finding station of the Reichsmarine (1935-1945 Kriegsmarine) at the Baltic Sea in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, which served the observation of the radio traffic on the southern Baltic Sea. The tower is located right next to the Jaromarsburg at Cape Arkona on the Wittow peninsula at the northern tip of the island of Rügen. Within sight are the two lighthouses at Cape Arkona."

The Milky Way passing by behind the positioning tower and the lights of Sassnitz and Bergen caused me some bellyaches during the processing. For all those interested, I would like to briefly document my processing steps:

First I stacked the 180 frames in Sequator v1.6.0 (High dynamic range: On, Remove dynamic noises: On, Reduce distortion effects: Complex, Reduce light pollution: Uneven - Middle + Intelligently-aggressive). Surprisingly, Sequator gave a better stacking result than PixInsight. My guess is that the support of the EXIF of lenses helps here a lot. The light pollution algorithm in Sequator also did a good job to bring out the Milky Way details. Unfortunately, using the DBE process in PixInsight did not produce the desired result - at least I couldn't get it to work here .

Then I stacked the frames for the foreground in PixInsight. The better calibration, noise reduction and stacking algorithm produced a cleaner result compared to Sequator.

Now I processed the Milky Way image further in PixInsight i.e. BackgroundNeutralization, SCNR, ArcsinhStretch, StarNet, MaskedStretch + Contrast Enhancement using CurvesTransformation, noise reduction, correction of the light pollution algorithm artifacts especially around the tower, final CurvesTransformation steps. After that I edited the foreground image i.e. SCNR, noise reduction, HistogramTransformation and CurvesTransformation steps for color and brightness correction. 

Finally, I blended the Milky Way and foreground images in Gimp. Done

I hope some of you will find this information helpful.


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Additional information regarding the reworked image revision from January 2022. 

I used an enhanced and more sophisticated processing workflow: 
1. Used PixInsight to integrate and process the frames. Especially the DBE process was used instead of Sequator background gradient removal feature.
2. Used Sequator tool to create an image which is only used for the stars. Interestingly the stars look better than using PixInsight integration!
3. Used StarNet process to create a starless image from the PixInsight integration and a star-only image from the Sequator integrated image.
4. Postprocess starless and star image and combine them finally. Some final enhancements like star size reduction and cropping.

DONE