Another image I decided to edit rather early in this cloudy spell. Just like with M101 earlier, it was a constant battle with clouds in subframes that could have led to loss of overall integration time.
Overall, I think the image ended up pretty nice. There are some faint details on the right hand side such as dark spots and a ridge that I managed to capture.
The 60s subframes did not show any haloing but the 3 min and 5 min subframes did. I'm mildly disappointed by their appearance but in the future I plan to work on editing them out using either no filter or some cleaning up in post.
I originally wanted to include Alnilam in the image as well but due to stacking artifacts, ended up having to crop it out. You can still see the residual glow from it in the top left.
Just like M101, since this was entirely Quadband data, the processing was rather simple.
Steps:
- Blink, clean, stack in ASTAP
- GraXpert standalone background removal
- Bring into Affinity Photo
- 2x Curves Stretching
- Noise reduction on color
- Levels adjustment to squash greens
- Curves for blackpoint
- Clarity filter on the flame
- Channel mixer to boost red 10% and blue 20%
In the future, I plan to do a higher resolution image of this region and add in Ha data at the very least.
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