Running Man Nebula

Christopher,  I'm fairly new at this avocation.  You have great data for sure from dark skies and great setup.  I've never seen this target so close up before. I'm impressed with the detail and natural color especially the dust both the cloudy white and brownish.  I don't see how to improve except maybe getting a bit more star color.  This is a fantastic image.

Star color is something I've and am struggling with.  I use StarExterminator to remove the stars and then work on their color, but just so so results.  I hope we get some good things to try from others in this thread.

I didn't notice that and will give it a try. Thanks!

Beautiful image, Christopher, I echo the other comments on the stars. Perhaps reduce the size too?

Uwe, here is some information on Starnet2. 

I followed instructions on the following and got it working on my Mac… https://www.galactic-hunter.com/post/starnet2
It coexists with version 1. I had to download and followed the directions, there is a cli version which is wrong so get the Pixinsight version only
The green highlighted one is not right, https://sourceforge.net/projects/starnet/files/v2.0/StarNetv2PI_MacOS.zip/download is the Mac one and there is a Windows version for PI too

Hope that helps!
Gowri

I found another site with the v2 download.  https://starnetastro.com

HA! I tried this site this afternoon as well and it did not work. BUT … now it did!!! Thanks John and Gowri!!! Already installed. Will do some comparisons with StarXTerminator for sure now 😊😊.

Yes, same here, had to overwrite the whining of my computer 😂😂😂.

I really like it! Curious what you both think of it too!

Lovely image Christopher–nice detail and color to the nebulosity!


The only thing to me  is your stars are either overexposed or overstretched. My own version of the Running Man suffers from the same issue, someday I will go back and redo it myself, now that I know how to fix this. This area does have lots of bright stars, which makes it difficult. The stars  should follow a PSF (point spread function), which means they are not just uniform intensity dots, they should fall off gradually in intensity from their centers.

First always check your individual light frames to check that stars are not saturated–if one or two color channels are saturated your star color will never be correct, if all are saturated you won't be able get color. If this is the problem, then you need to reduce your gain and/or exposure time for the stars–you can't process to good star color. Note the brightest stars may always be saturated, especially with a larger aperture, even at low gain extremely short exposures (<1s) might be required for some really bright stars. For bright stars as long as the halo is not saturated you can get some color there, even if the core is white.

If you lights are good, then you can reprocess the stars separately from the Nebulosity as is, otherwise redo some lights for the stars. I find adding the stars back in as a screen layer in Photoshop works well, I presume there is something similar in PixInsight. If you have the stars separated, you can carefully add a mask with some blur to reduce the halos on the stars before you add them back in. I use StarTools for processing, it has great tools for reducing halos, both intensity and or color. You can presumably do the same in PixInsight. There are tons of tutorials out there for PixInsight if you search for them.

Personally StarXterminator, which I run as a plug-in in Photoshop gives better results than I ever got with Starnet++, and much faster by a long way. And convenient integrated into Photoshop.  Bright stars will need a manual fix as well, I use content-aware fill in Photoshop. Not removing stars works better if you first reduce the halos. Star extraction has more difficulty with removing the halos as they can look too much like nebulosity.

Hope this helps.
Rick

Thanks Uwe! Great to see the math behind the screen function. And thanks, I just downloaded the new windows version at https://starnetastro.com (though it took me a few browsers to find one whose security would allow me to download it). It is faster than before and nice to have the GUI. Quality is similar to a little worse for the image I was currently working on, for leaving halos and bright stars. For my image anyway, StarXterminator was about 2x faster and shows a little less residuals. But I will keep StarNetv2 in my tool kit, as, if I have learned one thing, no single tool is best for all images.