this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2025
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Astrophotography

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[–] lefty7283@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

Another faint nebula from light polluted skies! Really like how the faint background dust in the Sii channel turned out in this. Captured over a bunch of nights from January-March 2025, from a bortle 9 zone.

Places where I host my other images:

Flickr


Equipment:

  • TPO 6" F/4 Imaging Newtonian

  • Orion Sirius EQ-G

  • ZWO ASI1600MM-Pro

  • Skywatcher Quattro Coma Corrector

  • ZWO EFW 8x1.25"/31mm

  • Astronomik LRGB+CLS Filters- 31mm

  • Astrodon 31mm Ha 5nm, Oiii 3nm, Sii 5nm

  • Agena 50mm Deluxe Straight-Through Guide Scope

  • ZWO ASI-290mc for guiding

  • Moonlite Autofocuser

Acquisition: 68 hours 4 minutes (Camera at -15°C), unity gain

  • Ha - 179x600"

  • Sii - 219x600"

  • R - 36x60"

  • G - 35x60"

  • B - 33x60"

  • Darks- 30

  • Flats- 30 per filter

Capture Software:

  • Captured using N.I.N.A. and PHD2 for guiding and dithering.

PixInsight Preprocessing:

  • BatchPreProcessing

  • StarAlignment

  • Blink

  • ImageIntegration per channel

  • DrizzleIntegration (2x, Var β=1.5)

  • Dynamic Crop

  • DynamicBackgroundExtraction

    duplicated each image and removed stars via StarXterminator. Ran DBE with a shitload of points to generate background model. model subtracted from original pic using the following PixelMath (math courtesy of /u/jimmythechicken1)

    $T * med(model) / model

Narrowband Linear:

  • Blur and NoiseXTerminator

  • StarXterminator to completely remove stars from each the image

  • HistogramTransformation to stretch Ha and Sii images to nonlinear

Broadband/RGB linear:

  • ChannelCombination to make color image from R G and B stacks

  • SpectrophotometricColorCalibration

  • HSV repair to fix blown out star cores

  • StarX (correct only)

  • StarX to make a stars only image

  • ArcsinhStretch + Histogramtransformation to stretch nonlinear (Calling this the Stars image now)

  • SCNR > Invert > SCNR (50%) > Invert to remove greens and some magentas from stars

  • Slight saturation boost

Nonlinear:

  • Pixelmath to combine stretched narrowband images into color image (HSS --> RGB)

  • Shitloads of curve transformations to adjust lightness, contrast, saturation, color balance, etc

  • ColorSaturation

  • NoiseXterminator

  • Pixelmath to add in the stretched RGB Stars image from earlier

    This basically re-linearizes the two images, adds them together, and then stretches them back to before. More info on it here)

    mtf(.005,

    mtf(.995,Stars)+

    mtf(.995,Starless))

  • few more curve adjustments

  • DynamicCrop again (just a little bit)

  • Resample to 60%

  • Annotation