I've been working on this one briefly every night I could get home early enough from work. The North America Nebula sets behind the roof of my house pretty quickly into the night and has been doing that earlier each night. This image was taken in Ha Oiii dual narrowband with the MC Duo. It was another learning experience to edit. This time around, I did not separate the channels and work on them for the overall composition, I utilized all the OSC color as is and enhanced the reds and blues with the goal of a red-blue ish palette. The only channel I separated out was the Ha from the Red channel. I used that as a luminance layer and that turned out to be a good idea. It saved a lot of the detail I lost when stretching the starless nebula. This is also the first time using GraXpert in a processed image. I think it did a good job. Next up, I'll need to learn about using linear data in starnet so I can go ASTAP, GraXpert, Starnet 2 CLI, then Affinity without having to bounce between Affinity and Starnet 2.
Processing process:
- Analyze and stack in ASTAP
- Use GraXpert standalone on the stacked fits file
- Bring into Affinity Photo
- Levels and Curves to stretch the image
- Export the image to a 16bit TIFF
- Export the red channel of the image to a 16bit TIFF
- Starnet2 CLI on both images to get starless nebula in dual narrowband color and in monochrome Ha.
- Bring both images back to Affinity
- Monochrome is layered on top of the starless nebula as a luminance layer while the starless nebula gets HSL shift for more blue pale blue and darker reds, levels on colors, denoising, color balance adjustment, brightness and contrast
- Lastly, the stars from the Ha were brought back in and a minimum blur and some channel mixing.
Learned a bit on this one. Another way to edit dual narrowband images and a bit about Ha as a luminance. I also figured out my scope has some coma or astigmatism as the stars are kinda cone shaped. I'll need to ask Apertura about it since this is a Petzval.
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