Boogeyman Nebula

[Stefan B]

Surprisingly I got two nights during this new moon phase. Initially it was about four nights which had been forecasted but I try hard not to complain

I went for the Boogeyman Nebula. There are so many great images of this object out there so I had to try. Suspiciously many of them are from really dark sites or remote observatories. So four nights would certainly have been better than two...but I wanted to try not to complain, right?

I gave this several runs of processing, mainly to get the stretch right. Surprisingly I had more problems with the Ha background than with the dust (okay, you could say the dust is overstretched a bit). I had to throttle down gamma and strength in NBAccent quite a bit. Otherwise it would have been even more mottled. In contrast to most of my other pics I omitted 'Equalize noise grain' during denoising. Usually I like this a bit more since it avoids the mottling but noise was pretty dominant here so I went for full denoise (15 pixels ).

Anyway, for the limited integration time of about 11 hrs I am fine with it:

See https://www.astrobin.com/1iwsky/0/ for details.

Clear skies!

Stefan

[happy-kat]

Your stars are great I like the variety of intensity, did you use a mix of decon and shrink stars ?

[Stefan B]

Yes, I used SVDecon (mostly default) and shrink (15 iterations with Tighten; throttled up on Color Tame and Halo Extend). Usually, very small stars are further reduced by SuperStructure's DimSmall.

Regards
Stefan