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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.
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.
Selective Sharpening with High Pass Filter (radius 1.6).
10th November 2018, Exmoor, GMT+0, United Kingdom, TEMP: 8C, HUM: 96%, Bortle Class 3 ~SGM: 21.75 mag./arc sec2
14th, 16th, 28th & 30th January 2019, Bedworth, GMT+0, United Kingdom, Bortle Class 5 ~SGM: 19.57 mag./arc sec2
Camera: Nikon D810A
Imaging Telescope: Takahashi FS-60CB
Correcting Lens: Takahashi Reducer 0.72x (composite focal length at 264mm and focal ratio at f/4.9)
Mount: iOptron CEM25EC
14 bit RAW (NEF)
ISO 400 12 x 120" subs
ISO 400 77 x 180" subs
ISO 40, 5 x 240" subs
ISO 1600, 10 x 60" subs
ISO 1600, 8 x 180" subs (Bortle 5)
ISO 3200, 1 x 180" sub (Bortle 5)
5hrs 42mins
23 Darks, 23 Bias, 25 Flats
PixInsight 1.8 Core
Photoshop