I tried to up my game a bit with this image by going for my longest integration time yet and in using better software by investing in PixInsight and BlurXTerminator.
The data for this image was gathered over four nights with some decent gaps between them due to the UK weather.
As Orion is getting a bit lower now, for the final night of imaging I ventured out to a Bortle 4 area to capture unfiltered subs (usually I'm right in the middle of Bortle 6 and use an Optolong L-Pro for broadband). It was rather chilly sleeping in the car at -7 degrees but I think it was worth it for the extra data!
Imaging details:
- 10th-Nov-23: 25x300s Lights (L-Pro filter), 30 Flats, 30 Darks, 30 Dark-Flats, 70 Bias
- 15th-Nov-23: 40x300s Lights (L-Pro filter), 30 Flats, 30 Darks, 30 Dark-Flats, 70 Bias
- 9th-Dec-23: 24x300s Lights (L-Pro filter), 30 Flats, 30 Darks, 30 Dark-Flats, 70 Bias
- 9th-Jan-24: 67x180s Lights (L-Pro filter), 30 Flats, 21 Darks (less this time as I'd had enough of the cold), 30 Dark-Flats, 70 Bias
- Total subs: 156 at 10 hrs 46 mins
Processing details:
- Stacked at max-quality settings using WBPP in PixInsight with 2x drizzle and auto-crop
- Cropped in slightly more to remove an annoying stacking-artefact
- Background gradient removed using GraXpert
- BlurXTerminator to tidy things up and flatten the edge stars
- NoiseXTerminator for noise reduction (slightly more aggressive pass at 70% strength)
- Spectrophotometric-Color-Calibration (SPCC) ran to balance the colours (I need all the help I can get as I'm heavily colour-blind!)
- Generalised-Hyperbolic-Stretch to take the image out of being linear
- Slight curves adjustments and saturation bumps
- Another run through NoiseXTerminator but on a lower strength (roughly 50%)
- Saved as a Tiff and then exported as jpg via Photoshop (the legacy 'export for web' does a decent job at keeping the details within the jpg)
Massive shout-out to
@Luke Newbould for his videos over on his
Lukomatico YouTube channel, this is my best image yet and I pretty much owe it to learning a ton from binging his videos whilst the nights have been cloudy!
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