30 hours in on Fighting Dragons

[Muzfox]

Longest integration yet for me, 30 hours over 4 nights. 10 hours each of SII, HA and OIII. Next step will be LRGB stars to see if they add anything to the image.

You can see a full res version here on astrobin : https://astrob.in/7bpelh/0/

[alpal]

Looks great Murray,
it's nice and sharp and noise free with beautiful colors.


cheers
Allan.

[PKay]

A very stunning pair of dragons Murry.

Great depth and contrast and a dramatic variation of hue.

It would be most interesting to see your PI workflow.

Perhaps one day you might write it out for us!

Very well done :thumbsup:

[Muzfox]

Yeah for sure I can help out with that. It's a bit all over the shop at the moment but I do keep a document with the workflow so I can reproduce it in the future, just tweaking it as I go. This time around I had to integrate 4 sessions in total, and was hitting some hiccups with the WBPP process. I ended up using WBPP only to calibrate each session, then manually star aligned and integrated each filter set. Worked out well but did take rather a long time lol.

[Muzfox]

This is a cut and paste of my PI workflow I use as a guide. Not every step is used for every photo but should give a bit of a guide :

- Weighted Batch Processing
- Drizzle Integration
- Dynamic Crop
- Background Extraction
- Noise Reduction
- Stretch
- Linear Fit
- Channel Combination
- SCNR on Green 84%
- Correct Magenta Stars Script
- Starmask Noise 0.4 / Scale 5+ / Smoothness 8
- Apply Starmask
- Morphological Transformation to reduce stars
- Starnet to remove stars / create starmask
- Clonestamp clean up
- Background Extraction
- Create Colourmasks
- Use masks with Curves
- More noise reduction if needed
- Extract L-Component from RGB image
- Run Starnet on HA
- Mask HA with L-Component
- Run MLT
- Duplicate RGB and run Convolution to Blur / Shape 2
- LRGB Combination / HA to L Slot / Uncheck RGB / Check Chrominance Noise Reduction / Apply to blurred image / Adjust lightness slider (decrease)
- Deconvolution for Sharpening
- Apply L-Component Mask from earlier set to protect background
- STDev 2.0 / Shape 2 / Interation 1
- Local Histogram Equalisation for sharpening
- HDR Multiscale Transform / Check Lightness Mask / Play with # of layers
- Curves Transformation / RGBk / Lightness / Saturation
- ACDNR
- Dark Structure Enhance
- Pixel Math - add stars back in
- Curves - Colour Saturation
- Image Export
- Final in LR/Photoshop

[Stephane]

Murray, this is an excellent image with some very nice colours. I have taken note of your Pixinsight workflow as I am always trying to improve my own. At this stage in Melbourne, I would be pleased to get 30 minutes of data, let alone 30 hours… well done on a nicely-processed image.

[Retrograde]

Excellent work Murray!

[Shiraz]

lovely low noise image Murray.