Completely clear skies come along so rarely in the UK that you have to take opportunities where presented, this was the case not he night of the 23rd September 2022. I has scheduled to do a full night on the Soul Nebula, however the clear sky as focussed was not as clear as expected earlier in the evening. Soul was blocked for about 2 hours. A quick re-think and re-target to part of the sky what was clear. I had already gathered data focussing on the Eastern and the Wester veil separately earlier in the Summer and I had a good feeling that I could frame both in one single image. It's slightly tight and certainly does not leave much room for cropping out star elongation I often get in one of the corners. All this said here is just 1h12m.
Capture
2022-09-23
30 Flats
10 Darks
20 Lights 240s ISO800
Optolong l-Enhance filter
Pre-Processing
After Filtering out for FWHM and wRWHM was left with 112, filters used: -
f = 3.2 - 2 removed
Stacked 18 * 240s -Total Integration Time = 1h12m
Post Processing
Siril
Crop
Rotate 180 - Lion upside down!
Background Gradient
Colour Calibration Photometry
Deconvolution (1.2)
asinh Stretch - minimal (30,30,5)
Histogram Stretch
Starless and Stars created using Siril Pixel Maths and Starnet++.
Once we have a TIFF (16 bit version) of Starless move into PS.
Photoshop Processing
Levels
Curves
Raw - Highlights and Contrast
Raw - Texture
Raw - Clarity
Raw - Noise Reduction
Raw - Saturation and Vibrancy and Shadow
Created FIT version of TIFF file output from PS using Siril
Once back from PS then Pixel Math Add the Stars image back into the FIT version of the Photoshop processed TIFF file.
Created JPG version