I shot this mostly just to have a true color photo of M52, since my last go at it in 2019 was done in narrowband, with typical ugly narrowband stars. Captured on July 18th, 2023 from the Deerlick Astronomy Village (bortle 3 zone)

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-290mc for guiding

• Moonlite Autofocuser

Acquisition: 2 hours 2 minutes (Camera at half Unity Gain, -15°C)

• L- 30x120"

• R - 11x120"

• G - 10x120"

• B - 10x120"

• Darks- 30

• Flats- 30 per filter

Capture Software:

• Captured using N.I.N.A. and PHD2 for guiding and dithering.

PixInsight Processing

• BatchPreProcessing

• StarAlignment

• Blink

• ImageIntegration

• DrizzleIntegration (2x, var β=1.5)

Luminance Linear:

• DynamicCrop

• DynamicBackgroundExtraction

• BlurXTerminator

• NoiseXterminator

• ArcsinhStretch+HistogramTransformation to bring nonlinear

RGB Linear:

• DynamicCrop

• DynamicBackgroundExtraction

• ChannelCombination

• SpectrophotometricColorCalibration

• HSV Repair

• Slight SCNR green

• DeepSNR

• AcrsinhStretch + HistogramTransformation to stretch nonlinear

Nonlinear:

• added stretched luminance to stretched RGB via LRGBCombination

• shitloads of CurveTransformations to adjust hue, lightness, saturation, etc. (some with lum masks)

• DeepSNR

• MLT Chrominance noise reduction

• LocalHistogramTransformation

• more curves

• SCNR

• BlurX for star reduction

• even more curves

• Resample to 60%

• annotation

Breathtaking. Thanks for sharing this!