We are back!  With the monsoon season in full swing and taking time away to enjoy summer and family, it feels great to finally look at some archived data we have and freshen up our processing skills.  Over the last ten months, there has been a constant influx of data pouring in from all the sequenced targets we have running.  Most of the time available during this period was literally spent selecting targets, setting up sequences, reviewing data, analyzing all subframes, calibrating the images, and tucking them away neatly for a future rainy day.  

The data was captured during March through June of 2021 using a 5" Explore Scientific scope at 952mm.  The difficulty with this target is the highest altitude we see it is  at 45 degrees in the southern sky.  We of course could not pass up on the opportunity to image a target made so famous by the Hubble Space Telescope.  The beauty of operating a remote shed is the fact we could collect data over a wide swath of days and varying sky/moon conditions from the comfort of home (and sometimes bed).

It has been a minute since we have crunched some data, but boy has the landscape changed in the last year.  NSG has been a thing for a while but with the new improvements and ability to scale past an upper limit of 1.0 has been a game changer.  If you have not checked in with John or aquired the NSGXnml script it is worth every penny.  You can now drizzle and write normalization data files instead of new image files.  Visit his website for more information:

https://sites.google.com/view/normalizescalegradient

Russell Croman has also flexed his muscle and creatively put together some other useful modules for PixInsight and PhotoShop.  I am very pleased with the new NoiseXTerminator software and love its ability not to contourt stars.  StarXTerminator has been around for some time and still proves extremely handy over the StarNet modules.  I still change our AI version depending on the target, but I've found that version 6 and 10 work great.  When I'm really picky, I've been blending the results from these two starless images to retain nebula structures but also remove larger star blooms.  Wisit his website for more information:

https://www.rc-astro.com/resources/index.html

If you are looking for more information about the actual Pillars of Creation, NASA has a bunch of published articles regarding every technical detail you can imagine.  They are so good in fact, I wouldn't want to embarass myself regurgitating those details as they are quite a fascinating read.  

If there are any questions, feel free to comment or shoot over a message!  

Wade and Dave
WD Astro