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  • Omega Centauri is the largest globular cluster in the sky and contains about 10 million stars, but it's generally considered a southern hemisphere target since it's at -47 declination. It was right at the meridian for me while waiting for it to get completely dark out, so I tried shooting it at just 9 degrees up. Had to do short exposures without guiding, because even the dim flashlights of the other campers with me would overwhelm my guide camera. Captured on June 7th, 2024 from a Bortle 3 zone (Deerlick Astronomy Village)

    Places where I host my other images:

    Instagram | Flickr

    Equipment:

    • TPO 6" F/4 Imaging Newtonian
    • Orion Sirius EQ-G
    • ZWO ASI1600MM-Pro
    • Skywatcher Quattro Coma Corrector
    • ZWO EFW 8x1.25"/31mm
    • Astronomik LRGB+CLS Filters- 31mm
    • Astrodon 31mm Ha 5nm, Oiii 3nm, Sii 5nm
    • Agena 50mm Deluxe Straight-Through Guide Scope
    • ZWO ASI-120MC for guiding
    • Moonlite Autofocuser

    Acquisition: 12 minutes (Camera at half Unity Gain, -15°C)

    • Lum - 20x10"
    • Red - 11x15"
    • Green - 13x15"
    • Blue - 12x15"
    • Flats- 30 per filter

    Capture Software:

    PixInsight Processing:

    • BatchPreProcessing
    • StarAlignment
    • Blink
    • ImageIntegration
    • DrizzleIntegration (2x, Var β=1.5)
    • DynamicCrop
    • DynamicBackgroundExtraction

    duplicated each image and removed stars via StarXterminator. Ran DBE with a shitload of points to generate background model. model subtracted from original pic using the following PixelMath (math courtesy of /u/jimmythechicken1)

    $T * med(model) / model

    Luminance:

    • BlurXTerminator (correct only mode)
    • ArcsinhStretch + histogramtransformation to bring nonlinear

    RGB:

    • ChannelCombinaiton to combine monochrome R, G, B stacks into color image
    • BlurXTerminator (correct only mode)
    • SpectroPhotometricColorCalibration
    • HSV Repair
    • MMT for large scale chrominance noise reduction
    • ArcsinhStretch + histogramtransformation to bring nonlinear

    Nonlinear:

    • LRGBCombination with stretched L as luminance
    • Several CurveTransformations to adjust lightness, contrast, colors, saturation, etc.
    • DeepSNR Noise reduction
    • HistogramTransformations
    • More curves
    • Resample to 70%
    • Annotation