ABSTRACT
The images were acquired with the diminutive William Optics Star 71 5-element astrograph. Astrophotography is a continual learning experience; it is all too easy to plough in and follow established, familiar processing workflows. Using Ha for luminance naturally favors its own and often leads to a red-dominated picture. Although red nebulosity is abundant in this image, it gives the flame nebula a red hue too and in addition, diminishes the appearance of several blue reflection nebula close to the familiar horse head. RGB processing followed a similar path of blending. The Ha and Red channels were equalized using the LinearFit tool and then blended 1:2, on account of the stronger Ha signal. The bright star sizes in the color image were reduced further, using a star mask and the Morphological Transformation tool. The Star Mask noise threshold was set to detect the brightest stars, with sufficient structure growth to encompass their immediate surroundings.
