This was by far the trickiest image I've processed yet, I'm very new to PixInsight so it's been quite difficult to learn how to process this target to what is hopefully a semi-good standard with the gear I have.
Acquisition Details:
- 10th Nov-23: 18 Lights (300 secs), 30 Flats, 30 Dark-flats, 30 Darks, 70 Bias
- 15th Nov-23: 36 Lights (300 secs), 30 Flats, 30 Dark-flats, 30 Darks, 70 Bias
- 9th Dec-23: 26 Lights (300 secs), 9 Flats, 30 Dark-flats, 30 Darks, 70 Bias
- 15th Jan-24: 41 Lights (300 secs), 30 Flats, 30 Dark-flats, 30 Darks, 70 Bias
- 17th Jan-24: 32 Lights (300 secs), 30 Flats, 30 Dark-flats, 30 Darks, 70 Bias
Total Integration of 12 hrs and 45 mins.
Whilst 30 flats were taken on the 9th Dec, only 9 were usable as the light-source I used slipped about a bit on the white t-shirt I'd stretched over the dew-cap which seemingly caused a huge dust-spot to wiggle about the frames which then were over-corrected for in the final stack, so I simply discarded them.
Rather annoyingly, on the 15th and 17th January, the temperatures were approximately -8°C outside, whilst great for the noise reduction on the DSLR, I believe the cold caused warping/contractions within the OTA and caused one or two of the screws around the objective lens to protrude slightly into the optical path so my stars have a bit of a weird spike to them. I need to investigate this as I had loosened them before to prevent a similar issue in the past.
Processing Details:
- Images organised in folders and then renamed via a Python script to be easily grouped by keywords in WBPP so each night's lights would be calibrated with the respective calibration frames
- Stacked in WBPP (2x drizzle)
- Ran through GraXpert to remove gradients from light-pollution and moonlight
- Platesolved (Image Analysis > Solver)
- Colour Calibration via SPCC
- Ran through BlurXTerminator
- Ran through NoiseXTerminator (set to 70%)
- Ran through StarXTerminator
- Small lens-reflections and missed stars cleaned up via the clone-stamp tool
- Slight stretching via Histogram Transformation (2-3 iterations of this)
- Mask of the galaxy was generated using the GAME mask generator
- Very slight run through GHS (generalised hyperbolic stretch) to increase details in the spiral arms and reset black points and midtones
- Series of curves transformations to increase saturation and remove slight green-cast (2-3 iterations of this)
- Local Histogram Equalisation to bring out detail in the dust-lanes of the spiral arms
- Curve transformations on the stars to bring up the saturation (2-3 small iterations of this)
- Slight star reduction via Morphological Transformation
- Galaxy and stars rescreened back together
- Minor run through Photoshop to do final cropping and very minor tweaks in Camera-Raw
- Weak pass through NoiseXTerminator (50%) in Photoshop
- Save and done!
For the above processing I followed along to
SpaceMan_dan27's video on YouTube - he got good results so I thought I'd give it a try.
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