Veil Nebula combination in HOO & RGB

[mightymonoped]

As I seem to be playing with colours this week, I thought it might be fun to have a play with merging two individual captures, one in HOO, the other in RGB. Both were captured with the WO Redcat and ASI294mc pro, one with an Optolong l-eNhance NB filter, the other with an Optolong l-Pro filter in RGB.

I loaded both unprocessed Fits files into Astro Pixel Processor and did a little bit of cleanup work for light pollution on both before analysing the stars and registering them against each other. I then saved the registered images as .tif files and merged them in Photoshop at 50% transparency.

I cropped the merged image and saved as a separate image before splitting it into starry and starless versions using starnet++

Subtracted the starry from the starless using Apply Image and cut and pasted the star layer into the starless image using linear dodge.

I then went to town on the starless version, healing artefacts before playing with the details and colour mix using Camera Raw Filter.

Then did a general cleanup using Noel's Action for noise reduction and local contrast enhancement.

Reduced the star layer using Curves before merging the layer back into the overall image.

Hasn't actually made a huge difference but has pulled out some of the fainter stuff and it's fun to play with colours 🙂