Thanks Mike. My skies are generally dark towards the west (out to sea), south (further away from the CBD), and east (towards hills). North is my worst sky as it's looking towards Adelaide. I can see the Milky Way and both the LMC and SMC on moonless nights.
I have done
another reprocess. I generally follow Scott Rosen's workflow which involves using a synthetic luminance image made from the grayscale version of the RGB image. However, I read up that one can identify the best colour channel and use this as a synthetic luminance image. Given this region in mainly Ha, the red channel produced the best SNR. I did however layer mask in the Flame region from the grayscale RGB as it looked better than the one in the red channel.
I had issues with star halos when blending the synthetic luminance and RGB because of differences in star sizes (smaller in luminance compared to RGB). This is a common issue when blending Ha data with RGB data. However, I followed
this which simply involved using a Minimum Filter on the stars in the RGB image before combining the synthetic luminance data.
I'm really pleased with the results and think it's an improvement from my previous attempt. Always learning new tricks!
Any feedback is more than welcome
Link to image (3MB)