The shots were taken in June-July 2022, and originally intended to be part of a collaboration image but that mostly fell through. I also wasn't quite ready for prime time, not yet having my EFW or mono filters. So instead, I took a few hours of duoband "luminance" with the 2600MM and an L-eNhance filter, and then a couple more through the f/s D5300.
In ASTAP I rescaled the DSLR stack to trick ASTAP into choosing the reference I wanted (from the mono) and then extracted the channels. That allowed star alignment of L, R, G, and B. Because I couldn't otherwise get my 2xG in ST, I manually did so with the G and B files via compose to save out just an OIII file. All of this was then composed into ST as bicolor but L, RGB because I didn't think the DSLR data had great SNR. Even so, the result is fairly noisy but integration is limited.
Following crop, 50% bin, wipe, and optidev, all I did was HDR to reveal some details in the Crescent, and SVD. Color was HOO matrix, and the bias sliders were all zeroed out so no throttling. I did bump the general sat slider, and I changed back to scientific color constancy and normal CIELab luminance setting. Then just a mild denoise. No SS or shrink, embracing the very busy star field.
I did like that a number of stars strewn throughout, including one of the bigger ones, displays some nice color in the Ha. So they aren't entirely all teal. In addition to helping hide some of the noise, all the stars also seem to give a bit of life to the image.
I do see a bit of the tiny star ringing that's been discussed in the beta thread, but you probably have to really pixel peep to notice it. I considered a no-shrink-shrink for the deringing controls, but making a proper mask to get all the tiny stars, and not pick up non-stellar features, seemed hard to pull off. And manual mask creation would take a week. I mean, as Carl Sagan would say, there's billions and billions of those tiny stars.
The image is so busy that downsampling and quality-reduction to get a jpg of about 500kb isn't very feasible, so I uploaded to the staging area of astrobin for review.
That might be backfiring also. While I think the image looks decent enough when I open it on a 4K monitor (usually xnview, which overrides OS settings and maintains pixel scale), if I look at the a-bin image on the internet with my "normal" Firefox that uses the Windows 150% display magnification, eh, maybe doesn't look so great after all when upsampled.
There's a lot of good stuff in this region, but my Crescent should probably be recaptured and with the proper filters and all 2600 next time. The soap bubble is just barely visible, which is probably appropriate.
https://astrob.in/5raexo/0/
