M8 - my second target from last weekend and first ever attempt at the Lagoon Nebula. With my limited knowledge of astro-image processing I found M8 difficult to process and look 'right' (albeit that's a subjective thing): the nebula's colours always looked strange (too pinkish); processing with either Siril or APP resulted in so many stars that it was distracting; and, the background always had a green hue despite my best efforts to remove the colour cast.
Anywhooo here is my inaugural attempt at M8:
28 x 180s subs
Darks, flats and dark flats
SW120ED with reducer/flattener @f6.4
ASI294MC
Edited in APP, Photoshop and (very lightly in) Topaz DeNoise, then cropped.
I need to learn how to make stars smaller lol! Alex
A great shot of M8. Having just done an image of M8 I can totally agree with you - the colours can be difficult to tease out and keep all that glorious detail.
And yeah, colours are a very personal thing. After all, our eyes can only see a grey smudge in the eye piece. Who are we to say what colour scheme is "correct"?
Hi Steve and thanks for the feedback. Btw, we're both on a KStars/Ekos journey using Macs, and I have a RPi4 on my mount (AZ-EQ6) running Stellarmate that I connect to remotely. All things considered, it's working very well so far.
Also, if you get a white screen when running the Polemaster software on your Mac (after the initial connection), just disconnect and then immediately reconnect and it'll work a advertised. It's a known bug/problem/feature of Polemaster software on MacOS. Alex
Nice pic mate. Got some good detail coming through. APP does have a star reduction tool but be very careful with it as I found it can introduce some artefacts around the reduced star that will become more pronounced during further processing.
Hi Dave and thanks for the feedback and info about APP. I did attempt to use the star reduction feature but discovered, as you said, that it leaves odd artefacts like small black rings around stars so I've stopped using it for now. When I have more time (...one day!) I'll play with the various sliders and see what they do to the stars. I also purchased a Photoshop plugin that conveniently extracts stars into a separate layer so they can be edited independently, but I've not had time too experiment with it. Sticking to basics.
When I'm next home and the weather is behaving, I might get some more data but using my Baader UHC-S filter. Alex
