So many stars...

[Ken Pendlebury]

Hoping somebody can help here...

Below you can see my first attempt at the crescent nebula.  I am concerned because there are SO MANY stars that they actually drown out the DSO.  Is there a way to tame these stars without affecting the nebula (too much)?  Thanks for any tips.

Ken

[Nocturnal]

You could try creating a star mask and then applying a morphological transformation with an erosion filter. Search the forum for some of those terms for more information.

[Ken Pendlebury]

Thanks Sander.  I was at a loss for what search terms to use.  Using your suggestions, I was able to dig up some information.  I will give it a go and report back.

Thanks again,
Ken

[Nocturnal]

Hi Ken,

that's a common problem and not just here on this forum. How do you search for something when you don't know how -others- describe it?

[Carlos Milovic]

Hi Ken

I played a bit with your image. Another alternative to build the mask is to use the gradient (see the GradientMapper process I uploaded). You may modify it a bit with curves or HT to fine tune it, but it basically will target the outer regions of the stars, leaving low contrast features and the star cores untouched.
 See the attached images. The second one has curves on it, to increase contrast and saturation.

[Carlos Milovic]

and the modified version...

[Ken Pendlebury]

Wow!  Thanks Carlos!

Did you ever build GradientMapper for the Mac?

[Harry page]

Hi

Of course there is a video on how to do it http://www.harrysastroshed.com/mask.html   


Harry

[Carlos Milovic]

No, sorry But Juan wrote a few days ago a simple script that performs the same task. See his latest posts in the development subforums.

[Ken Pendlebury]

Thanks Harry.  I will check out your video and try it out...

Carlos,  Sorry to be a pain, but I can't locate any scripts by Juan that might match your description (in the lat 30 days).

Regards,
Ken

[Carlos Milovic]

http://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?topic=2228.msg14630;topicseen#msg14630

[Ken Pendlebury]

Thanks to all who helped me out here.  I ended up going with the script that Juan wrote in order to generate the star mask and then used Harry's excellent tutorial in order to get a handle on erosion (MT).

After this, I used some admittedly heavy ACDNR because the minimized stars now appeared as noise (to me).  Inspecting the image at full scale clearly shows artifacts indicative of ACDNR abuse .  I will say that I prefer this artifacting over the noisier "minimized" version...

Here is the wide field page with all sizes:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kenastro/4970111770/sizes/l/in/photostream/

Here is the crop page with al sizes:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kenastro/4970100530/sizes/l/in/photostream/

Thanks again,
Ken

[Nocturnal]

Hi Ken,

I think you did great work reducing star sizes but now stars that are close together seem to have blended into one, giving the impression of many small lines or dots with 'commas' instead of dots. This looks a little odd.

[Ken Pendlebury]

Ok... maybe I'm off base about the "pre-ACDNR" noise level...  I will post this one up a bit later.

Thanks for the feedback.

[Harry page]

Hi

Like most tool you have to be how much you use them 

With the morph tool try using a smaller amount try 0.1 and more iterations ( i have used up to 10 ) , this can give better results 

Also when using the star mask , I almost ignore the small stars so they do not get mushed 

Just a thought

Harry