A fragment of North America in SHO

My first attempt at processing SHO data. Right away, I ended up with this fantasy-like version, and I kind of liked it, so I decided to keep it for now. Perhaps in the future, as I get more practice, I'll develop my own style. For now, I didn't fully clean up all the color imperfections; my eyes aren't yet accustomed to the palette and are easily fooled during processing.

The background is taken from a classic SHO, and the stars from a slightly modified HOO (I added a bit more sulfur to the green channel). The stars were separated from the background using the new Starnet after noise reduction (otherwise, artifacts from noise appear when recombining the stars and background). Under bright stars, purple halos remained on the background, but they were fairly easy to clean up in Photoshop.

When processing the background and stars separately, it's very important to check the color profile of the files—Starnet doesn't preserve the file profile, so it needs to be double-checked and corrected in Photoshop if necessary.

During shooting, the ZWO SII filter produced a radial flare from the nearby bright star ξ Cygni (magnitude 3.7), similar to amplifier glow, which had to be cleaned up in Photoshop. The Baader and Astronomik filters were fine.

Shooting dates: April 23, April 29–May 2, May 31–June 2, June 9–11, June 16–19, 2022 (oxygen on darker skies, hydrogen on brighter skies).