M16 SHO The Pillars of Creation (Niall MacNeill)

M16 SHO The Pillars of Creation

This is my second SHO effort and with the iconic M16. The result was very different to my previous work with M20 and I have to say, much easier to get an aesthetically pleasing result. I hope you agree. As before I removed the magenta hue. The blue and gold colours were there from the outset but I enhanced these whilst pulling down the green. Overall the result is, I think, in keeping with other reference images that use the Hubble palette.
I used Starnet and then Photoshop, using Kevin Morefield's process to end up with a high quality starless image. From there I was able to apply a number of processes such as HDRMT, LHE, and Unsharp Masking, with judicious use of denoising as well as Curves Transformation to improve the sharpness, definition and contrast, evolving the colours to the classic Hubble palette appearance.
I initially added back the SHO stars, dealing with the usual pink halos, but subsequently reprocessed my RGB data to add back the RGB stars. This gave a more natural and colourful appearance to the stars, which integrated very well. I subdued the stars with Morphological Transformation coming to what I think is a nice balance.
I include a mouse-over zoomed in version C, which shows the detail of the Pillars of Creation and the surrounding region.
Version D is a comparison with the Hubble SHO image, Whilst the superior resolution of the scope free from the atmosphere and with a mirror ~ 7X the diameter, is quite clear it does demonstrate how well modest amateur equipment and image processing techniques can capture deep sky.

Final
Original
C
D

C

Title: M16 SHO zoomed in

Description: Zoomed in version showing the detail of the Pillars of Creation and the surrounding region

Uploaded: ...

D

Title: Comparison with the HST SHO image

Description: Here I have cut and pasted the famous Hubble Space Telescope image, rotating it to the same aspect as mine for comparison purposes. Whilst the superior resolution of the scope free from the atmosphere and with a mirror ~ 7X the diameter, is quite clear it does demonstrate how well modest amateur equipment and image processing techniques can capture deep sky.

Uploaded: ...

	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
Star trails
Northern lights
Noctilucent clouds
Landscape

	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
Own remote observatory
Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5233103
PixInsight job	G0R8X1ONNNDQ92AZFVUN04TXFULVM26O
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	18h18m46s.248
RA (top/left)	18h19m51s.443
RA (top/right)	18h17m42s.418
RA (bottom/right)	18h17m40s.909
RA (bottom/left)	18h19m50s.247

Dec (center)	-13°47′54″.78
Dec (top/left)	-13°32′22″.93
Dec (top/right)	-13°32′04″.14
Dec (bottom/right)	-14°03′25″.35
Dec (bottom/left)	-14°03′44″.89

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M16 SHO The Pillars of Creation

M16 SHO The Pillars of Creation

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M16 SHO The Pillars of Creation

M16 SHO The Pillars of Creation

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