M16 Eagle Nebula

[smokey688i]

Thought I'd share my latest shot of M16.

Followed a bi-color processing flow with this one, similar to the JPM tone-mapping approach in that I removed the stars before stretching the channels individually. The light frames were shot using a self-modded Nikon D5100 DSLR with an Improved DGM NPB filter, which has very tight passbands around the Ha and Oiii spectral lines.

I first processed the image normally in StarTools, then performed a star removal and split it into RGB components (could have split them up front and then ran initial process, but wanted to see if I could get a usable result this way). I combined the G and B channels as they both reflect Oiii. After stretching each channel individually in GIMP, and fine-tuning a luminance frame created from the starless color image, the StarTools LRGB module was used to remap the Ha to red, and Oiii to blue (green is synthesized automatically). Stars were added back in to the final image using the Layers module in StarTools.

All processing done in StarTools, GIMP, and final denoising and deconvolution sharpening in Noiseware and AstraImage.

19x300s lights from two nights (plus darks, flats, and bias)

https://www.flickr.com/photos/nitehauck ... en-public/