This is a fresh go at Omega Centauri, the monstrous large globular cluster in the southern skies. 

This time round my goal was to preserve star colors right to the core of the cluster, inspired by the famous Hubble images of the cluster's core, see image below.  The different star populations (red-yellow-white-blue) is quite unique, and I really wanted to try and carry that idea over to my image.

This was not so easy, as at magnitude ~4, it is a very bright target.  The core burns out very quickly, even with relative short sub exposures, while the outer rim stars of the cluster is very faint.  Huge dynamic range differences to deal with.

To overcome this, I built a HDR luminance with 10s, 150s and 300s sub-exposure masters, using the Pixinsight HDR Composition process.

I relied on the Photometric Color Calibration process to give me the most accurate star colors possible.

Further down the processing workflow I had to compress the dynamic range even more with HDR Multiscale Transform for the colors to show through the bright core. 

This can unfortunately leave the cluster's appearance quite flat.  To fix this, I blended several layers of the HDR compressed and non compressed versions in Photoshop using layer blend modes such as soft light and darken color to balance the color and brightness of the core.

I am quite happy with the result from comparatively limited data, only ~3 hours total intergration.

For fun I went into my image archive and located my previous attempt of the target, back in 2013 (see below).  I loved this image, as it was one of the first targets I imaged when I got my Takahashi FSQ106.  Its interesting to see how technology (ie processing techniques) and one's own skillset evolve.  It feels slow sometimes, but comparing  'progress snapshots'  that's far apart like in this personal example the evolution is quite apparent. 

How will the next version, ~10 years in the future look like?    Guess we will have to wait and see, but its surely exciting to think about!   I will reserve a revision slot! 

Hope you enjoy!

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Hubble's image of the Omega Centauri globular cluster's core:




My 2013 Version of Omega Centauri: