Description

This was a fun object to image - most of my weekends available for imaging are spent directly North of the Wichita area, so Milky Way objects are essentially unavailable due to light pollution to the South.

However, since the sun has been setting earlier I was able to set up at my home SE of Wichita and observe and image the Milky Way, even on work nights.

This image is the result of 5 days worth of imaging at the start and end of September accumulating to about 3.75 untrimmed hours of data. During telescope setup I would also point my camera at the Milky Way core for widefield shots using my static tripod, which I posted several days ago.

Unfortunately by even early September M16 tends to be setting soon after evening darkness, and the problem was no less present in the later days of the month. As a result, the stars in the image tend to have some atmospheric aberration I was unable to remove. I was hoping Photoshop or Star Tools would have some sort of radial blurring tool but even after consulting the forums here I was unable to find a solution.

However, the Life Module in Star Tools proved effective in brightening star glow to somewhat remove the visible aberration.

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July 2020 Reprocess: Starting with original DSS-output image in PixInsight

- Color: Crop, DBE, LinearFit (G Reference), HSV, Channel Recombine, Photometric Color Calib, TGVD (Rista), MMT (Rista), MorphologicalTrans/MMT for star erosion using StarNet-StarMask from a non-linear copy, ArcsinH, ran heavy MMT noise reduction for "tone mapping," LRGB Combination with L

- Luminance: extracted L from Color image post-Photometric step, ran Deconvolution, TGVD (Rista), MMT (Rista), Masked Stretch, StarNet erosion, LRGB Combination

- LRGB: export to Photoshop, ran heavy blur blended as color using star mask, various Curves and Saturation adjustments