lefty7283

Finally going through my processing backlog! I tried to get some Ha on this from home, but I had too many obstructions to shoot at this declination. Decided to keep this as a wider crop since most the images of this I see are cropped in on just the nebula itself. Captured captured on November 23rd, 2025 from a Bortle 3 zone (deerlick astronomy village).

Places where I host my other images:

Flickr | Pixelfed

Equipment:

• TPO 6" F/4 Imaging Newtonian

• Orion Sirius EQ-G

• ZWO ASI1600MM-Pro

• Skywatcher Quattro Coma Corrector

• ZWO EFW 8x1.25"/31mm

• Astronomik LRGB+CLS Filters- 31mm

• Astrodon 31mm Ha 5nm, Oiii 3nm, Sii 5nm

• Agena 50mm Deluxe Straight-Through Guide Scope

• ZWO ASI-290mc for guiding

• Moonlite Autofocuser

Acquisition: 10 hours 12 minutes (Camera at unity gain, -15°C)

• L - 97x180"

• R - 37x180"

• G - 36x180"

• B - 34x180"

• Darks- 30

• Flats- 30 per filter

Capture Software:

• Captured using N.I.N.A. and PHD2 for guiding and dithering.

PixInsight Preprocessing:

• BatchPreProcessing

• StarAlignment

• Blink

• ImageIntegration per channel

The luminance data was split into 3 stacks and combined to use the single channel DeepSNR method

• DrizzleIntegration (2x, Var β=1.5)

• Dynamic Crop

Luminance linear:

• MultiscaleGradientCorrection using MARS Project data

• BlurXterminator

• StarXterminator to completely remove stars (extracted stars processed separately)

• STF applied via HistogramTransformation to stretch nonlinear

RGB Linear:

• Channelcombination to make color image from RGB stacks

• MultiscaleGradientCorrection

• SpectrophotometricColorCalibration

• BlurX (correct only mode)

• StarX to remove stars (to be used for star addition later)

• StarX to extract a stars only image

• ArcsinhStretch + HistogramTransformation to stretch nonlinear

• Slight curves saturation boost and histogram adjustments

Stars only image:

• HSV repair

• ArcsinhStretch + HistogramTransformation to stretch nonlinear (less aggressive stretch)

• Slight curve adjustments

Nonlinear Processing

• LRGBCombination to combine stretched RGB and L images

• DeepSNR Noise reduction

• Shitloads of curve transformations to adjust luminance, contrast, saturation, etc

• More curves

• NoiseXTerminator for some small scale chrominance noise reduction

• LocalHistogramTransformation

• Even more curves

• ColorSaturation adjustments (get rid of some background greens)

• Pixelmath to add in the stretched stars only image from earlier

  This basically re-linearizes the two images, adds them together, and then stretches them back to before. More info on it here)

  mtf(.005,

  mtf(.995,Stars)+

  mtf(.995,Starless))

• Resample to 60%

• Annotation

Started watching the last season of For All Mankind before season 5 comes out.

Also watched The Last Vampire on Earth for bad movie night last night. It’s best described as “if Tommy Wiseau tried to make Twilight”

What equipment did you use?

Not really an acute thing, but there’s this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid-induced_hyperalgesia

Expansion ratio with a 30ft nozzle gotta be insane

We watched Hell Comes to Frogtown for bad movie night last night. It certainly was interesting.

After a worldwide nuclear war, where 68% of the male population was wiped out and virile men becoming a rarity, Sam Hell, a scavenger and a highly virile man, is assigned to help rescue a group of fertile women kidnapped by humanoid frogs.

What did you use to capture/process this?

Siril should be able to. I'll admit I've never used it myself (I use pixinsight for all my processing), but I know it's a fairly popular free processing option. Also you'll definitely want to try and take more dark frames than just one. Generally you'll stack the darks together, and then subtract that from your lights (this should remove most of the noise thats not the fixed hot pixels)

That seems like a fairly typical amount to me (certainly a lot less than my old canon 600d)

Hot pixels! Best way to deal with them is taking dark frames: a bunch of exposures with the exact same settings as your light/main frames, but with the lens cap on so it just captures the noise. Also important that your camera is roughly the same temperature as when you took the light frames, since this type of noise is very temperature dependent. Once you have your dark frames, you can stack them to make a master dark, and use this to subtract the hot pixels from your lights using a deep sky stacking program of your choice.

Side note: for most consumer cameras, using a higher ISO will actually lower noise, at the cost of dynamic range

☝️presenting to the emergency room

The STOP-BANG questionnaire is good to get at least some idea of if you have sleep apnea or not. Def talk to your doctor about it! Untreated sleep apnea can lead to some pretty bad health problems later on (a-fib, coronary disease, stokes, hypertension) in addition to just being tired as shit all the time