M16 - The Eagle Nebula

[brisk lichen]

Here is an image I took of the eagle nebula over the last few nights! Definitely not perfect, I plan on adding RGB stars sometime in the future. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out for the first time imaging and editing something like this (with lots of help from scrolling through forums and youtube lol)

Details:
11.4 hours total integration
140 x 300 sec
50 bias, 30 darks, 30 flats
Bortle 3/4

Equipment:
Camera: ZWO ASI533MC Pro; -10c, Gain of 101
Filter: Optolong L-eXtreme
Telescope: Orion StarBlast 4.5; 2x barlow
Guide Camera: ZWO ASI120MM Mini
Guide Scope: SV106 50mm
Mount: HEQ5-Pro
Computer: ZWO ASIAIR Plus

Software used: Siril, Gimp, GraXpert

[steel bobcat]

Whoah, I love the colors here

[runic jolt]

Really pretty color palette, reminds me of what the Orion Nebula looks like in true color

[snow python]

orion starblast 💪

[rocky crane]

Watermelon flavoured colour palette

[brisk lichen]

So true

[half veldt]

@brisk lichen actually though how did you get those colors? It looks sick

[brisk lichen]

I don't remember my exact process, but I started out by stacking in siril with the option of osc_extractHaOIII. I then combined those into what i would use as a luminance layer and edited that with curves, some noise reduction, deconvolution, and brought the highlights down for more contrast. Then I took the ha and oiii files and combined them to make a rgb image, then removed the stars, edited the starless with a ghs stretch, some green noise reduction, and some saturation. I think I then took that image to GraXpert for some noise reduction, then worked on the star mask, mainly desaturating the stars so they weren't a bright blue. Then I combined the stars back and brought that image into gimp and aligned the black and white layer to the rgb, and set the blending mode for the black and white to luminance. Then some final curves and level adjustments, saturation, and then exported and put back into GraXpert for a very light denoise. I think that's the process I used, but I may be forgetting some things 😅

[half veldt]

sheesh sounds like a lot of work. Good job