When we begin image acquisition for this, I thought it was going to be "just another" dark nebula. Not that this is a bad thing. I love imaging them, but it turns out there was enough data be able to pull out that faint detail and really bring the dark nebula out into the light.
I have to give credit to
@Chris Kagy who got a head start on processing this and when I saw what he did (
https://www.astrobin.com/a8a2is/), I knew I was no longer going to be satisfied with the image I had in my brain prior to starting. Chris marked me as a collaborated on his image (along with the rest of our team) so I'm returning the favor but really each person processed the image independently (though perhaps with some discussion about approaches on various things).
Here's what I did:
L:
dynamic crop
blurXterminator
starXterminator
GHS (three iterations, with very careful symmetry point selections)
noiseXterminator
L stars:
GHS
rgb stars:
GHS
unsharp mask (very mild sharpening)
RGB:
dynamic crop
SPCC
blurXterminator
starXterminator
GHS (three iterations with very careful symmetry point selection)
NoiseXterminator
LRGB Combination (adding L)
Because I used the color blend mode in the GHS stretch I had a very saturated background that looked, psychedelic. I used SCNR to pull most of the blue and all of the green out
Curves (contrast)
MLT (very mild sharpening)
pixel math in stars (screen)
It was really GHS that made this image possible. It was also incredible sensitive to where the symmetry point was set but by careful manipulation of the symmetry point it was possible to really enhance the contrast.
Thanks to the kind folks at AAPOD2 who selected this as their image for 18 July 2023:
https://www.aapod2.com/blog/dkr5rbajzxfqicgvuxzqv1md1ivdqp
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