first attempt at SHO M16 with PI

[Benjamin]

Ended with 10 hours on m16 - Ha 5nm, O3 3nm, S2 3nm (all 100 x 120s subs).
Taken through an ED80 on an HEQ5 with an ASI1600MM-Pro. Taken me hours and hours just to work through PixInsight processing, and ended up using StarTools to create the masks required to remove the stars for the tone mapping. Whoah! Its quite a learning curve but rather too much fun playing with parameters at times. Would really appreciate any comments.


I've added a version with more background nebulosity although it shows up the clumpiness with background that arose when removing the stars. Not sure quite how to go about smoothing that out or not creating it in the first place?

https://www.astrobin.com/355746/B/?nc=user

[Ryderscope]

Hi Ben, the version on Astrobin looks pretty good though the core may be very slightly overblown. I recommend sticking with the star masks as it takes a fair bit of trial and error to get them sorted. I have reasonable success with a number of iterative star masks and using the Morphological Transformation tool. I think the colour palette is great and the core takes on a kind of nice 3D effect :)

[Benjamin]

Thanks for the comments Rodney. I’ll certainly persist with the star masks in PI and start to work out range masks as well (not broached that territory yet) to avoid over doing some stretches. Working on M17 now so figure that will be a good target to investigate all this. I assume once I have a reasonable masking process it should be somewhat consistent with a particular camera/filter/scope combo? Is so, can these settings be saved somehow in PI? It’s probably obvious but I haven’t looked hard enough into many many things!

[Placidus]

The Astrobin version looks very good indeed. Lovely colour, nice and smooth with 10 hours of data. The stars are round and sharp and you've handled the star haloes magnificently.

[Ryderscope]

It certainly possible to create some generic processes with settings that suit. Say, for example, a star mask for the small stars and a star mask for the big stars. You will find however that every image is different and requires some tweaking. I recommend building an icon set that can be saved and then opened with each new image processing project. Warren Keller (IP4AP) has some tutorials and an icon set available which I recommend having a look at. Feel free to PM me if you have any specific PI questions.

[Benjamin]

Thanks for the kind comments. My stars have been regularly terrible until this process so happy to have a little success there. Will definitely look into the icon set. My PI workspace most often looks like my 7 year old daughter’s playroom... May well fire you some Qs Rodney. Also been in contact with Rick S who has also been a great help.

[strongmanmike]

A very nice result Ben :thumbsup:

Mike

[gregbradley]

That's a good image Ben. The Eagle area seems to be in a cavelike opening in the dust.

Greg.

[Andy01]

Aforementioned technical issues aside, the colour palette on the repro is sublime imo, well done! :thumbsup:

[Benjamin]

I’ve been a bit obsessed with seeing this as a cave...

Glad the colour seems okay. I’m not an avid photographer but rather an observer who wants to see a lot more of the objects via imaging so colour balance, and other aspectes, are very uninformed from a technical point of view. Narrowband does seem to free the creative spirit a bit, although with this I’m just tying to get a regular SHO gold/blue thing going, with a few flecks of other colours.

Love seeing the images here and all the amazing varieties that arise :-) Hugely inspiring and very daunting!

[SimmoW]

Yes thats a great first effort and impressive colours! Cant decide if the second one is better, though i do love a good neb hidden amongst the outer clouds.

[RickS]

Looks good, Ben. I like #2.