Longer yet worse exposure of the milky way core

[ELS]

278x8s exposures here. But the sky wasn't as clear as on my previous stacked milky way image that had 100x13s exposures. This time it seems the dark frames worked, for which there are 50x10s dark frames (yes I know, I should've matched the exposure time)
It was hard to get the colors right, and they still are jacked. I think the problem is at such low light input the linearity is unworkable. Most likely the response curve is also very unstable in that part, not too surprising for a 15y/o sensor. So I should probably try to maximize the light input instead of just total exposure time.

 

[Elp]

Depends on camera really and your light pollution. With my advanced compact which isn't really designed for AP I've revealed the milky way from a bortle 4 zone with a single 30s exposure.

[ELS]

50 minutes ago, Elp said:

Depends on camera really and your light pollution. With my advanced compact which isn't really designed for AP I've revealed the milky way from a bortle 4 zone with a single 30s exposure.

Perhaps you haven't processed them enough. I fiddle the curves on these images a ton. Without a ton of tweaking you can't see anything.
Try raising the black level/the lower left point on the luminance curve for each channel until you start to blank the noise level and get the starts to start contrasting against the background (I usually have to shift the mid point on the levels (not curves since it's easier to use the levels adjustment which gives a simple midpoint adjuster) until I can actually see what I'm editing. Then do the noise blanking.
And then just tweak the curve afterwards to get the contrast in the parts I want. usually having the an S figure on the left side to highly contrast the low light objects.

Here, 1 is the stacked image unprocessed. 2 is just shifting the luminance midpoint down to brighten up the image and make is visible. The overlay is the color curves added for picture 3 to blank out the noise. and 4 is the "final" image and the corresponding curves applied to it overlayed

Edited yesterday at 14:47 by ELS

[Elp]

Perhaps read my comment again. I could see the milky way in my single 30s images without editing out of camera.

With post processing and stacking I could reveal far more.

The point of my comment is, you maybe need to expose per sub longer than you are if star trailing isn't an issue. One of the last videos posted by the late great Alyn Wallace demonstrated this perfectly, he did the same subject tracked and long exposure with one rig, and very short exposures fixed camera with another. The latter he basically said was a waste of time compared to the former.

[ELS]

13 minutes ago, Elp said:

Perhaps read my comment again. I could see the milky way in my single 30s images without editing out of camera.

With post processing and stacking I could reveal far more.

The point of my comment is, you maybe need to expose per sub longer than you are if star trailing isn't an issue. One of the last videos posted by the late great Alyn Wallace demonstrated this perfectly, he did the same subject tracked and long exposure with one rig, and very short exposures fixed camera with another. The latter he basically said was a waste of time compared to the former.

Yeah that's what I'm saying, I got way better results with the 13s exposures than the 8s ones despite having nearly 2x the total exposure time with the 8s ones.

[ELS]

I took another crack at processing the image and got way better results.
I also reduced the light pollution glow by manually raising the black level on subsequent copied layers and blending them, there's probably a tool made for this but I couldn't find it. A gradient wouldn't really cut it since it's more of like a diamond shape, and also that would lack finer level control



 

Some NR and a bit more color correction:

Edited yesterday at 22:28 by ELS