M57 - HDR Nightmare

I'm at a loss. None of the masking techniques I am comfortable with yield a decent M57 and star background without a nasty delineation between the two.

This was just a couple hours of 240s subs but I wanted to see what I was working with on the first night.

294MC Pro
Calibrated with darks, flats and bias
Employed WBPP, ABEx3, PCC, Histogram, various masks (lum, starnet, range) and no clean result up to that point. I've tried separating all three channels before star removal, then recombining (this did make for a cleaner starless image but no help towards the end goal).

I would love some insights and sincerely appreciate your time.

Drizzled, channel separated files can be found here if you'd like to give it a go:

 
i made a huge mess of the background - needs more DBE - but how does this look?

Screen Shot 2022-07-22 at 3.54.53 PM.jpg
 
sure -

prior to this processing i did DBE to each channel master, then combined to an RGB image, solved it, and ran PCC.

the _L image is just the extracted luminance right before the first step it is used in, and _L1 is a luminance extracted from the starless version of the image so i could sharpen M57 without crisping up the stars. the first StarXterminator run was done thru the inverted luminance mask which gives you a quick and dirty star reduction.

process container attached but you'll have to generate the masks yourself.

rob


Screen Shot 2022-07-22 at 6.18.40 PM.jpeg
 

Attachments

  • m57proc.xpsm.zip
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