Lagoon Nebula (M8) -
wikipediaThe Lagoon Nebula is estimated to be between 4,000-6,000 light-years from the Earth. In the sky of Earth, it spans 90' by 40', which translates to an actual dimension of 110 by 50 light years.This image was my first of decent quality after a bit under a year of experimentation and learning. I wrote
my own software for the task, mostly because I enjoy it. The software does all, except creative editing:
[li]Stacking[/li]
[li]Dark frame substraction[/li]
[li]Flat field calibration[/li]
[li]Raw processing[/li]
[li]Linear-space dynamic range adjustments[/li]
[li]Gradient removal[/li]
You're welcome to give it a try, but you have to feel comfortable with a CLI.
Version BAdded data from 2 troubled nights, but that add a lot nonetheless. The original session was unguided but with a homemade "PEC".
The first added session was guided and with good guiding results, but awful weather: relatively thick high clouds unannouned rolled in while I was not looking, reducing signal strength 45% and adding hard to remove gradients, but they were removed and the results were good.
The second added session was similarly "smeared" by weather, wind this time. Again, everything was set up so I let it capture 2h worth of data, out of which only 40m were usable. Still, stars were oblong due to wind effects.
Processing was heavily improved in the time passed since the original upload, so I reprocessed the original data, which immediately improved it (better color balance, less background clipping). Added the other 2 nights, but I had to exclude the windy night to get good stars. I did however use that data. The full process follows:
[li]Stack all 3 sessions together[/li]
[li]Stack first 2 sessions together[/li]
[li]Transplant stars from windless stack into windy stack, leave the windy background[/li]
[li]Apply NR (separately to chroma and luma), use chroma from full stack, luma from transplanted stack[/li]
[li]Deconvolution and further NR[/li]
The result is what you see in version B.
Comments