Description:
There's a small personal achievement in this quest for the sky: to photograph the IFN.
Unlike the “usual” nebulae lit by neighboring stars, the IFN (Integrated Flux Nebula), a galactic cirrus of sorts, is only lit by the halo emitted by the entire Milky Way.
It's only been around ten years that we challenged that in amateur astrophotography, and for good reason, it's seriously faint : 1700 30-second exposures over 3 consecutive nights, over 1TB of raw data, and around 30 hours of processing were needed to reveal the delicate clouds.
In the background, the galaxies M81 and M82, 12 million light years away.
Sharpstar 61EDPH 61mm @F/4.5, Skyguider Pro unguided, A7SII unmodded. Bortle 4/5 backyard.
For those who had to work close to the noise floor with those Sony sensors, you may be familiar with the banding and color swathes problem. Exposing to 1/2 histogram at ISO 10k, and a large number of calibration frames (1000 darks, 600 flats, 600 dark flats, no biases) overcame the issue.
About processing :
> Siril for preprocessing :
- drizzle 2x
- crop
- gradient extraction
- photometric color balance
- autostretch
- scnr
- extraction of a L image from L.a.b., and a second RGB.
> Starnet++ and its neural networks to create two masters starless L and RGB.
> Photoshop :
- multiscale approach on the master Luminance starless (with gradual gaussian blurs), curves on each, and recombination
- star mask from RGB, Minimum filter
- master starless RGB applied as chrominance on Master L
- blend of all the layers
> Topaz Denoise AI for noise reduction, then back to PS for a lot more curves, and tune up the layers blend
> Lightroom for final cosmetic arrangements, crop, export.
Looking forward to comments and critics!
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