M57 with extreme star colors

[Ags]

This is another effort with my ST80 mounted on a 4SE mount. I really pushed the exposure length to 55 seconds this time, and had star trails in most images. I selected the best 39 and fortunately the random star trails cancelled out during stacking - although I am sure I lost definition in the nebula as a result.

My unmodded camera picked up some red signal, so I put the nebula in a separate layer and stretched the red like mad.

I tried an experiment to get star color into my image and it seems to have worked too well! All the stars were white, with colored fringes from the ST80's CA. Some fringes were red and others were blue so I thought I could get some color from this data. Firstly I created a green luminance layer to cut away the haloes. Then I created a color layer by subtracting a desaturated green layer from the stars, leaving only the haloes. Then I blurred the haloes and put the the resulting color mask under the luminosity layer. You can see the results below - very colorful! Hyper-real, to say the least. The colors may be wild, but they are based on some kind of real data.

Is there any simple technique to tone down the star colors? I thought of putting a monochrome layer on top and adjusting its transparency, but that might just make the colors muddy?

EDIT: I tried a gray layer with 50% transparency... I think ths new version looks a bit more realistic...?