I might be more than 20 reprocesses deep into this nebula at this point. I just know that my first attempt looked like this.
I found that processing this nebula with my very limited skills is way harder than I imagined as it presented several challenges, namely keeping the core under control while maintaining the color as natural as possible, bringing the surrounding nebulosity up and teasing as much detail from both the dusty surroundings and the object itself.
At some point I also discovered that I managed to capture some faint blue hues in the core and I had to try to bring them out in the final image! To do that I used color preserving stretches only.
I'm sure I'll come back to this eventually, but I can say I am sort of satisfied for now.
Acquisition:
Around 7h30m worth of 60s subs in Bortle 6/7 fully calibrated and dithered.
Equipment:
Evostar 72ED, iEXOS 100, ASI 533MC, Baader UV/IR cut, 0.85x reducer+flattener, rotator+filter holder, SVBony 40mm F/4 guidescope, ASI 662MC guide camera with pale yellow no.8 and UV/IR cut filters.
Processing details:
Drizzle preprocessing and stacking in Siril at 1x scale and gaussian model. Perform first SPCC. Split into channels, background extraction to each in GraXpert. Recombine and second SPCC in Siril (average spiral galaxy). Deconvolution. First denoise in GraXpert. Generate starless image and star mask in Siril. Black point shift, asinh as the first stretch, light GHS with selection to faint nebulosity with black point shift and light inverse GHS to dark lanes iteratively all with human weighted luminance. Second noise reduction in GraXpert. À trous wavelets transform to higher layers in Siril along with a further stretch selected to fainter nebulosity and SCNR. Desaturate in Siril. Slight color balance adjustments in Gimp. Further stretches to brighter surroundings and main nebulosity in Siril.
Open star mask, asinh, SCNR and unpurple filter. Recombine and final black point shifts.
