StarTools

Hello all,

My usual once-in-three-year picture, I haven't made much progress since 2017

12 pictures of normally 5 minutes each but I had some technical problems turing acquisition so total is 53min44s with an old Canon EOS450D mounted on a Vixen Polaris mount. Only signal, no dark, no flat, nothing, I was too lazy, and I trusted StarTool's magic
Although this camera is better than my previous Olympus I still have this problem of yellow-ish glowing. Also I expected more light from the nebula with almost 1h of data, so I guess I need to improve my acquisition technique first.

For those who want to give it a try, you can find the raw data here

Originally I thought I was taking the Trifid Nebula, and it's only at the end of the processing when I realised there was no blue in the cloud that it was the Lagoon nebula instead

Anyway, comments welcome!

Congrats on a new image. It doesn't matter how often you venture out, as long as you enjoy it when you do!

A couple of things that may help;

• Your dataset appears to be white balanced. If using DSS, have a look here for correct settings/procedure that will give you a little bit better signal to work with.
• Bin your dataset before processing, as your dataset is oversampled (see here). You can use the resulting better signal to your benefit during, for example, deconvolution.
• You should be able to roughly trust the Color module's balancing for your dataset; the star field should exhibit a good variety of different black body temperatures.
• As of the 1.7 alphas, StarTools' Denoise module has a dedicated walking noise reduction feature which can help mitigate the streaks caused by not dithering.

E.g. you could try going for something like this;