Color Balance on Nebula Image with not so many stars

[sreilly]

I understand the concept of color correction when there is a galaxy using the core and I understand using stars on other images. What has me a bit confused is a test image I took of M42 that has a great deal of nebulosity and not so many stars. My FOV is 43'x30' using my STL-11000 and 12.5" RC at f/9. I tried the star method and there doesn't seem to be enough stars to satisfy the correction as the corrected image is still very blue. Where do you go from there? Actually I was just going to make a jpg to post and dragged the STF icon I used to see the image with the Link RGB channels turned off over to the HST tool and it appears to have aligned my colors for me. I hadn't seen that before. A strange happenstance or have I stumbled upon something? Be kind, this is a test image only as the moon is nearly full, the flats needs to be re-done and its on 9-5 minute RGB images.

[Philip de Louraille]

Still feels a bit blueish to me. I compared it to previous shots I took but with a greater FOV so I had more info for the color correction.
I wonder if one could nto use (since we are in our own galaxy where tons of stars have been categorized) if one could not use the color of these stars to calibrate?

[Harry page]

Hi

If you neutrlize your background first you will get a correct STF , if uncheck the channel it carries out indepenpdant channel stretches which give a good idea of where you should be 

Some times I need to play by eye with the colour when there is no other way  i.e if you think it is to blue select the blue channel in the histogram trans tool and destretch a bit and then use the Background neut tool to balance things up again 

Harry

[Philip de Louraille]

Great advice - Thanks Harry