This creation of this image was a joint effort done by my colleague
@Winfried Arwers and me
Winfried was able to capture roughly one hour of data in the morning after a pretty stormy and actually rainy night. Obviously he was pretty lucky, as our weather conditions are exceptionally bad for any kind of astro imaging since weeks...
The series of images was taken between 5:30am and 6:45am using a DSLR with a camera lens on a traveller mount. The last frames short before sunrise were essentially brighter. Leonard had not fully reached M3 that morning, but Winfried managed to frame both objects quite nicely.
I then tried to apply my basic PixInsight knowledge to his data and really struggled for a while to get everything right (or at least not totally screwed up). After using PI's CometAlign process to get a star master and a comet master, I ended up with dim but nasty star trails in the combined image. Any kind of clone stamping or other editing approaches to the comet master only made it worse. Eventually
@Adam Block put up a cool video on comet processing and with his trick to create a mask of exactly those star trails by just integrating all comet aligned data but this time without any kind of rejection I was actually able to get rid of them! Just have a look at his video for the details.
Comments