Cygnus Wall and Gulf of Mexico Nebula

[Menno555]

Cygnus Wall and Gulf of Mexico dark nebula LDN 935, both part of the North America Nebula NGC 7000.

My first 2 part mosaic , 5:40 hours integration time for each part.

Processing was a challenge but still learning more and more. Some stars are somewhat bloated but that's also due to oversampling caused by camera/scope combination. I had enough data to leave the final version in relative high resolution without too much noise.

Full 3000px version on https://i.ibb.co/54FKvBK/Cygnus-Wall.jpg

Bortle 6/7
Meade LX200 8" f/10 ACF OTA
Ioptron CEM25EC mount (no guiding)
Optec Lepus 0.62X Standard reducer (0,73x effective)
Optolong L-eXtreme filter
Zwo ASI071MC Pro camera

Captured with SharpCap Pro @ -10 Celsius / White balance R50 B50
2 x (35 x 600 sec / Gain 90 / Offset 20)
20 x darks, 50x flats en 50x darkflats

Stacked with DeepSkyStacker, saved as TIF.

Photoshop: equal basic stretching on both stacks

Stitched the 2 stacks with Microsoft ICE.

Again Photoshop: Levels, Curves, Camera Raw Filter (blacks, clarity, sharpening, color), Neat Image Noise Reduction, ster reduction and some more steps. Reduced from 5000 to 3000px.

CygnusWallsm.jpg (494.57 KiB) Viewed 988 times

[timh]

Hi Menno,

Well that worked very nicely -- and with the combination of reducer and mosaic quite a wide field view!

Tim

[Menno555]

I posted this a year ago. Sadly I did delete all the data Don't ask me why because I myself also don't know.
But here at the moment it's clouds and and clouds clouds alone, so I was looking for something to do.
Although I have no data to stack, I did save the stacked capture as 16bit PNG, so I thought to try to process it in Photoshop with the new knowledge and new/updated software I have now.
And much to my own surprise, it turned out great. Mostly by using the white balance (Temperature and Tint in the Camera RAW Filter) and also by removing the stars with StarNet v2.
Also rotated it the right way so that now North is up and East is left.

For those unknown with StarNet v2: it's free software that removes stars from a capture. Then in your processing software (in my case Photoshop), you can subtract the starless version from the original, leaving you with a version that only contains the stars. Now you can process the starless version without altering the stars. For example stretching: this now can be done more because you don't have stars that will be stretched too.
You then can add the stars only version as a layer over the starless version to combine everything back.

Here is the full 3000px version: https://i.ibb.co/SN9DV6J/cynus-wall-II.jpg

Menno

[timh]

That is a very good find Menno from old data. Looks dramatic Tim

[Menno555]

Thank Tim!
The difference in colors indeed makes it look more dramatic.

Menno