Description

Acquiring this data as a Bortle ~2 location was quite a privilege. My local Astronomy group takes an annual trip to a nearby campground 90 minutes east of our city. As such, we have virtually no light pollution in the skies. Visibly seeing Andromeda drift across the sky is wonderful, and even untracked 15 second shots of the galactic arm via widefield lenses are impressive.

This outing was a proof of concept regarding packing for the eclipse. After driving for 1.5 hours, I found myself livid as I made my final approach into camp, suddenly vividly remembering how I left the charger for my camera plugged in beside my bed at home. Fortunately I was able to retrieve it the next day for a second night of good imaging.

The third stormed extensively - not many of us slept well with he pounding rain and relentless wind. The lighting was so close it looked bright purple through the walls of my tent, but I was content with 2 nights of ample data under perfect skies.

This image was a joy to process, having a set of data of adequate volume and quality is rare, and the amount of work I had to do to remove any gradients was minimal (though I admit, at nearly 28C the Color Noise was rampant, even after stacking). Event without light pollution I still found a strong yellow bias in the stretched image, likely caused by natural atmospheric glow and supported by some thinly spread high altitude clouds periodically moving overhead. GradientXTerminator helped somewhat with this, but my best results came from manually correcting the RGB balance.

An increase in saturation and some subtle changes in contrast using the Curves tool in Photoshop were all that was needed - almost too easy in some ways, so I may have to make this camping trip more frequent than yearly given the ease of aquiring good data.

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July 2020 Reprocessed in PixInsight:

- Color: Crop, DBE, Photometric CC, Hydrogen/GB Luminance blended into R/GB channels per LightVortexTutorials page on NB combination, TGVD/MMT (Rista), ArcSinH + Masked Stretch, ACDNR, LRGB Combination with H/GB Luminance

- Decon on H, Decon on average of G/B channels, StarNet on G/B channels, blended into H channel to form Master Luminance, Rista method TGVD/MMT, Masked Stretch, Rista ACDNR, LRGB Combination with color data

- "LRGB" Processing: Curves for Saturation, color balance, Morphological Trans. for star reduction