M24 is an area of the sky that is extremely dense and packed with stars! I wanted to go deep on this region to see how much nebulosity I could reveal behind those thousands of stars, so I spent 12.5 hours on it at f/2 from Bortle 2.I have never seen images of M24 that were very impressive or had much nebulosity in the background, which is strange because it lies in the bright and colorful Milky Way band. So I wanted to give it a try with the goal of showing what's hidden behind there in mind.
M24 is located about 10,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius. It is 600 light-years wide and is not considered a deep sky object but instead a star cloud. Only 3 entries in the Messier catalog are not considered objects.I decided to use my fast f/2 telescope under Bortle 2 skies to image Messier 24 for 12.5 hours over several clear nights. The fast optics and dark skies were a great combo to get very high quality data, and the single shots looked nice. I could only see one bit of nebulosity on the Master file once I stacked everything, so I was hoping that processing the target properly would reveal much more. This is what the Master file (12.5 hours) looked like right before processing started:
As you can see, there are some dark clouds and an obvious nebula on the bottom right, but not much else. This is because M24 is such a dense region of the sky, where thousands of individual stars can be seen through a single field of view through binoculars. These thousands of stars completely hide the potential beauty that is hidden in the background.I started processing the image, until it was time to temporarily remove the stars using StarXTerminator. The star mask can be seen below, there are so many stars that it almost looks like a regular deep sky image all by itself, despite being just a mask!
Once the stars were removed, I was completely shocked by the amount of nebulosity that was now visible in the background. So much gasses all over the field of view! I did my best to carefully process the data and enhance the details and colors as best as possible. You can see what the starless image looked like below:
There are so many bits of nebula of all shapes that can be seen all over the image which is beautiful. I then added the stars back on, and the final result looks great. Compare it to the Master file above, and see how much beauty the stars were hiding!
More information here:
https://www.galactic-hunter.com/post/messier-24-the-sagittarius-star-cloud-astrophotography-tips-pictures
As you can see, there are some dark clouds and an obvious nebula on the bottom right, but not much else. This is because M24 is such a dense region of the sky, where thousands of individual stars can be seen through a single field of view through binoculars. These thousands of stars completely hide the potential beauty that is hidden in the background.I started processing the image, until it was time to temporarily remove the stars using StarXTerminator. The star mask can be seen below, there are so many stars that it almost looks like a regular deep sky image all by itself, despite being just a mask! 
Once the stars were removed, I was completely shocked by the amount of nebulosity that was now visible in the background. So much gasses all over the field of view! I did my best to carefully process the data and enhance the details and colors as best as possible. You can see what the starless image looked like below:
There are so many bits of nebula of all shapes that can be seen all over the image which is beautiful. I then added the stars back on, and the final result looks great. Compare it to the Master file above, and see how much beauty the stars were hiding!
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