I have tried a new comet processing workflow in PixInsight:
- After calibration I normalised all lights with NormalizedScaleGradient and separated the star fields from the comet with StarXTerminator.
- No special settings for integrating the stars only frames with GeneralizedHyperbolicStretch after SpectrograpicColorCalibration as usual.
- Integrating the comet aligned frames with Sigma Clipping took some attempts to get the best sigma values to achieve the optimal ratio in between star trail rejection, noise and left over comet trail.
- The most striking star trails could be removed by applying the convoluted rejection high image of the star trails and some curve adjustments.
- I then removed the remaining faint star trails by masking the comet with the GAME script and applying a background model from AutomaticBackgroundExtraction.
- After applying ColorCalibration to the comet image with the results from the star field SCC and some stretching I combined star field and comet.
I tried the separation of stars and comet with the free Starnet tool first but StarXTerminator did a better job. It took only half the time and both image series, star fields and comet, have been of a better quality.
No noise reduction was applied to the image. The star field had no noise because it contained only stars without background information. All types of noise reduction to the comet that I tried seemed to destroy the faint structure of its halo and tail. So I decided to leave the noise in the image.
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