Corona Australis and its Star Field

[Russ.Carpenter]

This image and text were uploaded to StarTools this morning. To see the remarkable detail in the image, please click the link.https://www.astrobin.com/u6yioa/

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This celestial wonderland has been described many times in Astrobin, and I won’t repeat the details here. Instead, I’d like to spend a little time on processing technique.

After having experimented with Photoshop, PixInsight, StarTools and Affinity Photo over many years, I’ve landed on a favorite combination of programs. PixInsight for pre processing, StarTools for post processing, and Affinity Photo for minor polish. That was the approach used in this image. Affinity Photo was only used to generate the copyright notice and export images in different formats and file sizes.

I’ve been serving as an alpha tester for StarTools recently and this image was made with version 1.8 (alpha). The new version includes a revised deconvolution tool. You can see the impact of the new tool on the star field, which holds up pretty well with magnifications of up to 400 percent. The stars in globular cluster NGC 6723 are resolved to the core, which I consider very surprising for an image that was cropped from a field of view of 7.7 by 6 degrees. I uploaded an uncompressed file to Astrobin, because it’s the only way to appreciate the detail in the star field.

Tech Notes for Very Small Telescope
Nikon 200mm lens, f/2
10 Micron GM1000HPs Robotic Mount
FLI Microline 16200 CCD Camera, 6mm pixel
Processing with PixInsight, StarTools and Affinity Photo

[tango13]

Wow, that's a truly amazing image!
Congratulations on a great work!

[Russ.Carpenter]

Thanks for your comment. It's gratifying that an object that's been imaged so many times can still yield wonderful results.

Russ