StarTools

Cheers,

This is not on par with most of the images in the gallery, but one's got to start some where. Heart and Soul nebulae (+one airplane and a couple of satellites) imaged with Sigma 70-200 f2.8 APO @200mm and EOS 1000D ISO1600. A stack of 30 3min subs (unguided) and 10 darks for a total of 1h30min. More light is needed to bring out the nebulae more.

I was a bit surprised how crowded the area actually is. Looking at most of the photos they seem to be missing quite a few stars

could be that some of us reduce the size of the stars to make the object stand out more. Still my version of the Soul nebula still has a lot of stars
Che

Looking good!
You could get rid of the satellite trail by stacking using median, or by using some other rejection method. Worst case, you can touch up the image using the Heal module and drawing a simple line using the mask editor.

Thanks for the replies. Did some reprocessing with a sigma combined stack. I'm quite happy with the result but it is a bit soft. I'm having some difficulties with reducing the star quantity and size. Using Heal to remove the stars and then layers to combine the nebulosity and stars is a very handy feature. My problem is that when the stars are removed I get dark patches in the nebulosity and need to do quite a bit of gaussian blur to get rid of the dark patches. What would be the best way to handle a really busy star field such as this?

Have you tried using the Life module's Isolate preset (without a mask set)?
It should push back the busy star field.

There is also the Magic module to magically shrink or tighten your your stars

Combining both is also an option.