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Horsehead and Flame Nebulae, 2019

The dark space horse (IC 434) and the star-forming flame (NGC 2024) in the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex, home to protoplanets and young and bright stars 1,400 light years away.

Processing Details

PixInsight

Dynamic Crop on the master calibrated and registered (star-aligned) light frame.

Background Noise Reduction with Automatic Background Extraction.

Auto-stretch with STF (ScreenTransferFunction) with linked RGB channels.

Noise reduction was performed with MultiscaleLinearTransform. 4 layers with the following settings (R as default):

• Layer 1: Threshold 1.000, Amount 0.50, Iterations: 1

• Layer 2: Threshold 1.000, Amount 0.50, Iterations: 1

• Layer 3: Threshold 1.000, Amount 0.50, Iterations: 1

• Layer 4: Threshold 1.000, Amount 0.50, Iterations: 1

Further noise reduction was applied with ACDNR and StdDev of 0.6 and Amount 0.50.

Star Reduction was applied with StarMask at 0.04000 Noise threshold, Scale 6 and Structure Growth as 0, 1 and 2 (Large-scale, Small-scale and Compensation).

Curves Transformations were applied to boost RGB/K and Saturation.

Photoshop

Selective Sharpening with High Pass Filter (radius 1.6).

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