Heart of the Heart with ASI 071 with and w/o stars

[gorann]

Now I have finnished my two panel mosaic (with central overlap) mainly using my new OSC (ASI 071 MC pro). I used the ASI and my Esprit 150 for collecting Ha over two nights and used RGB data from my Canon 60Da on my ES 127 ED refractor from last winter. It is now 77x 5 min of Ha + 31 x 10 min of RGB, so totally 9 hours.

I also entertained myself of doing a starless version. I am a novice on star removal and I used a mix of two PS actions: Star Emoving JPM and Annie's action, both giving doubtful results, so I mixed them in layers and then the repair tool. Quite tedious work but with an interesting result. Not sure I like it but interesting...

C & S most welcome!

[RichLD]

Lovely job Goran! I think you've done a sterling job on the starless version, especially for a first attempt ?

[gorann]

41 minutes ago, RichLD said:

Lovely job Goran! I think you've done a sterling job on the starless version, especially for a first attempt ?

Thanks a lot Rich!

[MartinB]

I love the subtle colouration in the centre, lovely image.  Nebulosity always has some dramatic enhancement when the stars are stripped out, great for big arty prints!

[gorann]

2 hours ago, MartinB said:

I love the subtle colouration in the centre, lovely image.  Nebulosity always has some dramatic enhancement when the stars are stripped out, great for big arty prints!

Thanks Martin!

Yes, it is maybe more art than photography. I think about it as what the nebula may look like if we traveled there and got the stars behind us. But with this field of view it would obviously still  be some in front of us so ideally only the stars distant from the nebula should be removed - but it would be a hell of a job to figure that out and implement it in the processing.

One nice thing I played with in PS was to add the image with stars as a layer on top of the starless image and then play with the transparency slider to get full control over the brightness of the star field.