Friday night was clear until the moon rose at about midnight so I took the opportunity to add another 2 hours of data to that I’ve already collected on NGC 7000. The mount tracked well despite the brisk breeze and all 12 10 minute frames were good.
After calibration and stacking in Maxim DL, I opened Pixinsight for further processing. I’ve been playing with the Masked Stretch script but this has an unfortunate side effect of emphasizing the blue halos around bright stars and I haven’t worked out how to reduce this effect yet, so I used a basic histogram stretch. This was followed by an HDRMultiscaleTransform to push down some of the highlights and a LocalHistogramEqualisation (using a mask to protect the stars) to increase the contrast on dark structures. A morphological transform was used to reduce the intensity of the field stars.
After this, a TGVDenoise and saturation curves application completed the image.
