When I took
my first Astrophoto, I recall how excited I was to see the Trifid Nebula and its neighbour the Lagoon Nebula appear in my little telescope.
I've imaged the Lagoon Nebula a few times since then, but this is the first time I've imaged the Trifid Nebula on its own.
Unfortunately, after capturing the first few subs, low-level cloud rolled in and worsened as the night went to. I managed to capture only 12 subs, and another 16 the following night, of which 8 were unusable, leaving only 20 subs to process.
I used PixInsight to stack the subs, and NoiseX to reduce background noise. After colour calibration and level adjustment, I used StarX to create separate images of the starless nebula and just the stars before exporting them for further processing. After importing the images into Affinity Photo, I made some subtle colour adjustments then combined the images to create the final result.
Overall, I was pleased to get a reasonable image from only 20 subs, and somewhat surprised at the detail displayed in the blue reflection region, the surrounding HII regions, and the beautiful open cluster M21 (also known as Webb's Cross).
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