The Clouds of Orion – a 2 panel mosaic in HaGB.
My first ever true color (ish) image! The 2020-21 winter in Europe hasn’t been great for astrophotography. All of my clear nights went into this project, and yet it took me 4 months to get (only) 22 hours of data.
Equipment
- Samyang 135mm f/2
- QHY163M
- Baader narrowband filters
- Antlia LRGB filters
- Sky-Watcher HEQ5 Pro
- QHY5L-II-C and QHY 30mm guidescope
Acquisition (Total : 22.6h)
- Location : Backyard, bortle 5
- Ha : 16.8 hours
- G : 2.8 hours
- B : 3 hours
Processing (PixInsight)
Individual channel processing
- Gradient removal (DBE)
- Background levels equalization (dnaLinearFit)
- GradientMergeMosaic
- Noise reduction (TGV and MMT)
- HDRComposition (for Ha only, 30x10s stack)
- HistogramTransformation
- HDRMultiscaleTransformation
Luminance processing
- Create a synthetic luminance L from G and B
- ImageIntegration : noise evaluation, MAD estimator, no rejection
- Merge Ha and L into a dynamic super luminance
- StarNet++
- Sharpening (MMT)
- LocalHistogramEqualization
- Two passes : kernel radius of 50 and 512
- Adding the stars back (PixelMath)
- Star reduction (tutorial)
LRGB processing
- Final LRGB adjustments (52 in total)
- Curves, selective saturation, MMT, DBE using various masks
Taken in November 2020 – March 2021
Love your work! Excellent processing and wonderful result. 😉 I would love to see a guide on creating mosaics in PixInsight.
Thank you! I haven’t planned on writing a guide on mosaics but here’s the workflow I follow : https://chaoticnebula.com/pixinsight-mosaic-workflow/