Crescent Nebula in HRGB

[AbsolutelyN]

Still pretty low in the sky, this has been take over two, ever shorter nights. 44x 5min exposures for HA and an hour each for R, G and B. Esprit 100 with 1600mm. Out of interest I had a quick go at making it starless, not very high quality image but found the nebulosity amazing to see in isolation. 

https://www.astrobin.com/full/406898/0/?nc=user

[Guest]

Lovely image and processing.. :)

[Adreneline]

Really like the starless image. We go to a great deal of trouble to image nebula and sometimes I feel the stars kind of get in the way of appreciating the beauty of the very thing we are trying to image!

I would be interested to know which method you used to remove the stars; so far I've used PS Actions and Straton with some success.

Thanks for sharing.

Adrian

[AbsolutelyN]

Thanks, the starless was done with starnet++ which is a little command line tool. Never used it or done starless before, will look up the methods you mentioned thanks. https://sourceforge.net/projects/starnet/

[Adreneline]

19 minutes ago, AbsolutelyN said:

Thanks, the starless was done with starnet++ which is a little command line tool. Never used it or done starless before, will look up the methods you mentioned thanks. https://sourceforge.net/projects/starnet/

Thank you.

The PS Action I used was from Annie's Astro Actions; Straton is stand-alone Windows software.

HTH

[bobro]

Quite amazing what can be achieved in processing. Whilst not astronomically correct, I'm drawn to the starless version - sometimes less is more!

[Ags]

Very nice indeed. I very much prefer the one with stars in it; I think you need to see the nebula in its neighborhood!

[carastro]

Very nice.  You can always select just some of the brighter stars and copy them back into the starless image.  This will give some stars but also show the nebulosity better without all the hundreds of smaller stars.

Carole 

[AbsolutelyN]

That's a great idea Carole. It was just a bit of an experiment to see how it's done but removing all the stars really degraded the image quality so adding some back could be an interesting option. 

[carastro]

I did give it a "go" myself, but the images were not the same size/orientation/registered and without stars was impossible to register them, so I gave up.

Carole 

[AbsolutelyN]

This is a mix of the stars and starless images together, thanks for the idea Carol.