Capturing the stars, Wide Field (constructive critique explicitly welcome) (Björn)

Contains: Extremely wide field

Capturing the stars, Wide Field (constructive critique explicitly welcome)

From time to time, I give wide-field imaging another shot. Personally, I am never completely happy with the final results and I'm struggling to nail it down if the issue is my technical skills (correct equipment setup or post-processing settings and especially skills) or short-comings of my equipment. Most notably, I'm using a stock camera which means that shiny H-alpha regions are not a quick shot. Also, I'm already aware of the optical aberrations of the lens which is coma towards the field edges (although as far as I could research it, it's fairly modest for this (price-)class of lens) and heavy purple lateral color (the purple is very heavy and the color fringing is radial and outbound). Certainly, a camera modification or purchase plus a higher quality lens might help on that but I don't want to spend money if I still have to go quite some miles on the processing side.

Maybe you (if you haven't clicked away already) can shine some light on that. Hence, as written in the headline, I'd be happy to receive your constructive critique on the image.
The usual acquisition data is shown here. In addition, I've tried to set the camera to the most neutral settings possible (although with RAW most settings shouldn't be applied anyways - but who knows). For integration, I've used Sequator and Affinity Photo for subsequente processing and image combination. The sky consists of 96 20s frames and the foreground of a single 120s exposure with same capture settings.

As I said, I'd be happy about your feedback as I want to improve on my wide-field skills.

CS,
Björn

Affinity Photo for Astrophotography users
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Status	Basic failed
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Astrometry.net job	8277778
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Capturing the stars, Wide Field (constructive critique explicitly welcome)

Capturing the stars, Wide Field (constructive critique explicitly welcome)

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Capturing the stars, Wide Field (constructive critique explicitly welcome)

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