Crab Nebula (M1) over a couple of years

[discardedastro]

So, taking some of the data from this attempt back in March I added a bit more data and had another go at processing.

Same acquisition setup, so see prior thread for that, but I'd picked up a few nights of extra data and decided to try reprocessing.

This is the first image for which I've automated much of the processing of subframes for, too - I've written up my development efforts over here, but the short version is that everything the telescope captures is automatically indexed, analysed, and catalogued into a database; subsequently, given a target NGC reference, everything is extracted in clusters corresponding to alignment groups (for mosaics) along with the relevant calibration data and metadata, and a script I've made for PixInsight takes that data and does all the "boring" bits of processing like calibration and cosmetic correction, before setting everything up for manual subframe selection.

https://www.talkunafraid.co.uk/2022/02/cataloguing-astrophotography-data-for-fun-and-profit/

So, after that, I had a big pile of sorted and calibrated/corrected subframes - I used blink to throw out anything with satellite trails and very poor SNR which left me with about 40-50 exposures per filter. After that I went through a pretty basic LRGB workflow in PI, with deconvolution and a couple of noise reduction passes, giving the below result! I was able to preserve more of the background in this version which I'm happy about for framing, though the contrast of details in tne nebula are still an area I would like to improve on.

Edited March 6, 2022 by discardedastro