I'm working on the Pac-Man Nebula in Ha and OIII, and the first night's data taught me a little more about using Astro Pixel Processor's Combine RGB tool. Well, the data and Sara Wager taught me, at least. Getting the color I wanted in the nebula wrought all manner of havoc upon the stars. And to be fair, the best I could have hoped for from bicolor narrowband data would be...white dots.
But intrigued by a couple of by-the-way comments from Wager and from AstroStace, on a whim I tossed 10x30" each RGB onto the front end of tonight's imaging. Figured the moon was up and I'm imaging from my Bortle 8 back yard anyway, so I wasn't going to try too hard.
I had to work the light-pollution/gradient removal tool pretty hard to get there, but I wound up with some nice, quite colorful stars, calibrated along the H-R line so the colors will be reasonably accurate. Instead of doing starnet++ star removal and then subtracting that from the original to get a stars layer to be blended in later, I can just work with the starless image and combine it with the color-stars one at the end.
There's a bunch of noise in the background, of course, but I don't even care -- since all I want from this layer are the stars, I can clip the background right to black and let the nice 7.5 hours of narrowband data supply it.
Of course this is a very well-known technique, but I had no idea that one could get so much out of so little integration time and effort.
