M20 Trifid Nebula (James R Potts)

M20 Trifid Nebula

I captured this last night from my driveway just under 3 hours of mostly nice clear skies. We did have some light clouds roll in that cost me a few frames, but not terrible. I stacked my images with APP, but processed the image 2 separate ways. 1) The Main image was just stacked and then RGB combined in APP, so I ended up with a raw un-stretched FITS file. In PI performed the following steps: Dynamic Crop; DBE; Color calibration; BlurXTerminator; Noise Exterminator; used StarX to remove stars; used the Generalized Hyperbolic Stretch to stretch starless image and the star image; combined stars using Pixel Math and then touched up on PS. 2) The revision was processed first in APP, used APP's light removal tool, color calibration, & HSL selective color to remove green and add blue and red saturation. Opened in PI and ran BluxX and Noise Ext. then touched up in PS.

I like how both images came out. Stretching a star less image provided added nebulosity, but when I combined the stars back with Pixel Math, the 2 stars in the core of M20 lost their detail I tried several different formulas to try and fix the core stars in M20, but never could get them looking like they looked before I used StarX removal.

This took a lot of time to process the images like this, but the results are interested, not drastically different, yet there are some subtle differences. Also, I did not get the pinks that many of the other images show, but I went with the color calibration results of PI and APP, I did not try to do any extra coloration on these images.

Anyway, let me know what you think and if you have a preference.

Final
Original
B

B

Title: Revision processed mostly in APP

Uploaded: ...

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	7895868
PixInsight job	FFZVTQ2MGIMQLQ0DH0EUU236PVBW2TWZ
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	18h02m44s.142
RA (top/left)	18h02m52s.313
RA (top/right)	17h59m47s.994
RA (bottom/right)	18h02m35s.946
RA (bottom/left)	18h05m39s.455

Dec (center)	-22°57′23″.44
Dec (top/left)	-22°12′47″.20
Dec (top/right)	-23°16′16″.14
Dec (bottom/right)	-23°42′01″.30
Dec (bottom/left)	-22°38′19″.69

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