What the heck happened to the weather!
I'm supposed to be sitting here processing another image but the cloud doesn't seem to be giving me a break! According to CFN my next clear-ish night (for a few hours at least) might be thursday! After that who knows!
Soooo ... I'm relegated to fiddle-farting around.
I applied Synthetic Lum (Ls) when processing the first time to improve s/n (provided the RGB data is of a similar FWHM to the Lum). I did this within CCDStack (as a mean combine) and it significantly reduced background noise and brought out a few more fainter stars. But, since the seeing was much
better for the RGB data (FWHM 2.0 vs 2.7 for the Lum), I could also use Ls to naturally improve sharpness. This can't be done very effectively in CCDStack because averaging blurry with sharp only slightly improves sharpness. Because my processing skills have rusted, I
forgot to apply the improved resolution of Ls to the
high signal parts of the frame in PS. I've now done this for a noticeable (to me) improvement in sharpness. The brightness profile changed a bit too - for the better.
I've updated
my PBase images but to clearly illustrate the difference, below is a before (left) and after (right) comparison.