The Ghost of Cassiopeia (HSO) (Linda)

The Ghost of Cassiopeia (HSO)

This data was acquired between 17 September 2021 and 5 October 2021. This is not my equipment but I'm helping a friend with a project and I get to process the data we collect so it's a win/win situation.

This was a humbling choice as a first target. Navi (the bright star just out of frame) left a huge halo and lots of reflections around the frame. I cropped out the worst of the reflections but even then, it was tough. I think I went a bit too far with noise reduction. The data required a large stretch and even with a large number of hours the noise was strong and I may have overstepped but I've reached the point of mental exhaustion on this one so am going to go with what I have for now.

I want to revisit this with at some point. I'm sure there is more that could be done with improved skills.

I chose the HSO palette because the it seemed appropriately "ghostly". Although an unmodified SHO was also in the running. I chose the final cropping to remove Navi but leave some of it's halo because I couldn't fully remove the halo, just dim it some and if I had to leave the halo in then the "ghost" looking up toward this unseen light was a composition choice that appealed to me. I guess I was trying to make some lemonade out of a very bright lemon (to mix a metaphor or two).

Here's the processing steps:

H, S and O:
dynamic crop
deconvolution
ABE
cloned the H and renamed the clone L
starXterminator (trying out a trial of the PI plugin)
histogram transformation
tgv denoise

HSO:
Channel Combination (HSO)
histogram transofmration to balance color channels
LRGBCombination to add L in as luminance

L
starXterminator extracting stars
histogram transformation
tgv denoise
LHE
Adv Sharpening script
pixel math in stars

stars
histogram transformation

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5084566
PixInsight job	0LXZ4E38OA6XH794IJPMB6WTYHK6INO8
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	00h59m12s.967
RA (top/left)	00h55m40s.982
RA (top/right)	01h02m50s.925
RA (bottom/right)	01h02m48s.945
RA (bottom/left)	00h55m32s.690

Dec (center)	+61°03′56″.63
Dec (top/left)	+60°47′17″.67
Dec (top/right)	+60°48′22″.68
Dec (bottom/right)	+61°20′13″.81
Dec (bottom/left)	+61°19′06″.64

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