Though I think IC1318/γ Cyg can be used to describe most of the nebulosity around the star Sadr, stellarium has it directly over the bright nebula in this image. Overall I'd consider it an improvement over my last go at it back in 2020. Captured over 12 nights from Oct-Nov 2024 from a bortle 9 zone.
Acquisition: 25 hours 40 minutes (Camera at -15°C), unity gain
Ha - 50x600"
Oiii - 57x600"
Sii - 47x600"
Darks- 30
Flats- 30 per filter
Capture Software:
Captured using N.I.N.A. and PHD2 for guiding and dithering.
PixInsight Preprocessing:
BatchPreProcessing
StarAlignment
Blink
ImageIntegration per channel
DrizzleIntegration (2x, Var β=1.5)
Dynamic Crop
DynamicBackgroundExtraction
duplicated each image and removed stars via StarXterminator. Ran DBE with a shitload of points to generate background model. model subtracted from original pic using the following PixelMath (math courtesy of /u/jimmythechicken1)
$T * med(model) / model
Narrowband Linear:
Blur and NoiseXTerminator
made SHO image and extracted stars to be processed separately
StarXterminator to completely remove stars from each Ha, Oiii, and Sii image
HistogramTransformation to stretch nonlinear
Stars only image:
SpectrophotometricColorCalibration (narrowband working mode)
HSV repair
arcsinhstretch
scnr > invert > scnr > invert to remove greens and magentas
HistogramTransformation
(combined with starless pic later on)
Nonlinear:
PixelMath to combine monochrome Ha Oiii and Sii images into a color image with SHO --> RGB, respectively
slight SCNR (bright areas protected with Ha mask)
Some curves to adjust colors
LRGBCombination using stretched Ha as luminance (accidentally left that Ha mask on from earlier so it applied more to the bright parts, and honestly turned out nicer than applying the Ha luminance to the entire image)
Shitloads of Curve Transformations to adjust lightness, hues, contrast, saturation, etc
DeepSNR
MLT for small scale chrominance noise reduction
DarkStructureEnhance script
LocalHistogramEqualization
more curves
invert > slight scnr (masked) > invert to remove some background magentas
even more curves
Pixelmath to add in the stretched RGB stars only image from earlier
This basically re-linearizes the two images, adds them together, and then stretches them back to before. More info on it here)