Hi Trevor,
I’ll be the first one but I need a little more info please
Nice Carina
Scope ?
Mount ?
Camera type DSLR , cooled ,uncooled ?
Exposures ?
Darks ?
Flats ?
Filters ?
Guiding ?
Dithering ?
Location ? Without divulging your exact location
Sky conditions Bortle class ?
Moon phase ( assuming it was captured over the last couple of nights , so heaps of moon glare ? )
Stacking program ?
Processing software ?
Beautiful star colours. The gray centers to the brighter stars means they’ve been white clipped. This can happen when you stretch the image beyond the dynamic range and then try to pull back on the highlights. The image is also a bit noisy. This can be either stretching feint data too far or that your signal to noise ratio is too low. More subs will help with this or a cooler sensor. As the others have said, you haven’t provided enough information to really pin point where the improvements can be made.
Ok I’m going to assume it’s a picture that has 8 minutes 10 secs of data, given the name of the picture.
Astro imaging to be done well needs lots of time, Let’s say more than 10 minutes if that’s the case. Even a bright object should be something that has plenty of time on, the longer, better the results. I can’t overstate this.
There is detail in the very core, but outside of that it’s noisy due to lack of data.
I’m having a guess you have used a star reduction in photoshop the brighter stars close together have bars in between them, I guessing you’ve done the magic wand on stars, expand selection, feather, then applied a minimum filter. If it’s not that then some attempt at processing the brighter stars has been done.
The image seems to have a blue cast over the darker areas, you can open it and run the cursor over it and in the info tab you will see the RGB values, there’s lots of methods for getting the color balance better, probably a simple suggestion I’d download an image of this that you think is really well done and see how yours compares in terms of color, sharpness, etc, this is a bright object with lots of different areas, there’s usually an area of blank sky somewhere that you can use to get at least a good idea if you’re in the ballpark color wise.
On a positive your flat field seems ok enough.
My biggest advice is time time time. hours not minutes.
