NGC 6250 (Courtesy of Jose Joaquin Perez)

The benefit of PixInsight Horizons is that often the data is available to download in order to follow along with Adam step-by-step. This page contains the download links for NGC 6250.

This is the final section for the processing of the image. I demonstrate a little noise reduction and a small application of Local Histogram Equalization. I did do a few other final tweaks.. but what you see recorded here is very close to the final result. What makes processing this image interesting is that there are no references- all of the decisions made were based on what was intended to be communicated about this image that, hopefully, makes this an interesting and beautiful field to enjoy. 

I hope you enjoyed the journey and learned a few things along the way.

In this section I apply my innovative "star de-emphasis" technique to this image and minimize the distraction of the many medium to small stars. Doing so helps better communicate the sense of structure in the nebulae and the brightest stars that illuminate them.

Here we blend a starless version of the image in to the working picture to enhance the interesting colorful structures. 

Here we blend the H-alpha data into the Red channel and Luminance images using Adam's favorite technique. This section also features a creative take on blending significant structures by using a mask (large scale MMT).

Here an artistic consideration is made. I made the decision to highlight various elements of the image. The bright stars, basically in the foreground, are lost among the multitudes of others in the Milky Way. Thus here we make a mask and preferentially show these luminaries a bit brighter. Later the other stars will be de-emphasized creating an even more effective juxtaposition. 

As is typical, this section shows an incremental though modest improvement through deconvolution of the luminance image. My concern in being overly aggressive might result in harsh artifacts that would not allow for stars to be colored properly. That being said, it is simply another demonstration of deconvolution and how to do it. 

In this section of processing NGC 6250 we look at how DBE can be used on this data. Ultimately the data is quite good and devoid of obvious strong gradients. 

In this lesson we do this straightforward process of creating an RGB image using Photometric Color Calibration. There is a little detective work involved- but the good news is everything goes smoothly!

This section COMPLETELY fixes and explains all of the issues I had in the previous lesson. I am keeping the previous section and this "update" as a learning lesson. This is an important example of the process of figuring out issues and how to make astronomical imaging software work like it was designed to... and how you EXPECT it to work.  

IMPORTANT READ BELOW!

This section was an absolute struggle. I did something remarkable though- I forced StarAlignment to work even though it was doing something completely unexpected and ultimately I did NOT need to do any of this. Although the issue wasn't a concrete bug...it is pretty close. So you do not need to watch this section...but I still recommend you do. No one...and I truly mean no one, shows what it is like to actively solve problems. So here is the unfiltered recording and the next lesson solves all the problems. If I had this issue..you might as well! (At least I hope to think so... )

This section of processing NGC 6250 demonstrates the use of MURE Denoise. 

In this section we quickly integrate the data creating combined images in Ha, L,R,G,B. 

Section of processing NGC 6250 includes Cosmetic Correction and initial Star Alignment work. 

This is section one of processing NGC 6250. It includes an introduction, BPP and Blinking the data.