The Cygnus Loop, the Veil, the Fisherman's Net.

 Posted: Aug 5th, 2026
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Technical Info
Telescope/Lens: Samyang 135mm f/2.0 ED UMC
Camera: ZWO ASI 533MC Pro
Mount: Sky-Watcher star adventurer GTi
Guide Scope: svbony sv165
Guide Camera: zwo asi662mc
Software: DeepSkyStacer,pixinsight,PS
Accessories: антиросник
Exposure:
24 x 300" ISO/Gain: 100 - LAIDA dual band Ha OIII 7нм
Green, Bortle 4 zone:
 Kichmengskiy Gorodok Vologodskaya Oblast, Russia
 Aug 2nd, 2026
2 h 0 m
173
Resolution: 5520x5490 px
Scale: 6177 KB
The stars are a real problem. I can't shake the feeling that something is wrong with the lens, or maybe it's just a lack of experience in processing.
Updated
  Today, at 08:28
  2 h 25 m
Finally figured out the stars — the whole problem was in the crooked stacking in DSS. In PixInsight I couldn't stack, so I had to learn Siril. For a long time I…
  9 Aug, 2026
  2 h 35 m
I tried processing it in the HOO palette, but nothing decent came out with the stars (though on individual frames the stars look fine). Maybe over time I'll fig…
Current photo
  5 Aug, 2026
  2 h 0 m
The stars are a real problem. I can't shake the feeling that something is wrong with the lens, or maybe it's just a lack of experience in processing.
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Do you cut out stars during processing? Try splitting into channels and recombining them.
5 Aug, 2026 Reply
Nickolay Replied to Poppy8micro
Yes, StarNet in PixInsight plugin.
Can it be split and combined only in PixInsight or Siril? And what would that give. StarNet kind of grabs the background in tatters.
5 Aug, 2026 Reply
Poppy8micro Replied to Nickolay
If you split it in Siril and align the stars a bit better, it will gather them into clusters and remove the shift — there's a button for that in the alignment stacking section. Then, if you crop them a bit tighter, the background will be denser. If not, you can stretch between the stars using GHS and dim the stars either with StarNet or some other plugin.
5 Aug, 2026 Reply
Nickolay Replied to Poppy8micro
Understood, I'll dig into Siril. Thanks.
5 Aug, 2026 Reply
Oeswww Replied to Nickolay
Do you cut out the stars before stretching and then stretch them separately? In PixelMath, combine them: + . Substitute your own image names. Stretch the stars only slightly. Try a few stretches to find the right brightness so artifacts don't appear. And tell me how you stretch the stars.
6 Aug, 2026 Reply
Nickolay Replied to Oeswww
Yes, I remove the stars before stretching the histogram. After color calibration, I stretch them by eye and run them through morphology and deconvolution in PixInsight. In this case, those scripts were cranked to the maximum. Then I combine the image and the stars using screen blending in Photoshop.
6 Aug, 2026 Reply
Oeswww Replied to Nickolay
So the issue is most likely with the deconvolution. First, make sure the stretching is fine by reverting those changes. And if everything looks good, then you can play around with deconvolution. I also got some weird results with it in Siril and gave up on it, I just stretched the stars less instead.
6 Aug, 2026 Reply
Nickolay Replied to Oeswww
Let's give it a try.
6 Aug, 2026 Reply
Maybe one of the frames is out of focus? And for stacking, I liked the program ALS - Astro Live Stacker. https://als-app.org/
6 Aug, 2026 Reply
Nickolay Replied to Pavel Korytov
Regarding the defocus, I'm not sure. I deleted a few frames that were overexposed, possibly due to clouds. There's a chance that a few low-quality frames made it into the stack. I'll gather a couple more hours of signal and shoot the stars through an IR cut filter, then re-stack. Thanks for the link, I'll check out what that program is.
6 Aug, 2026 Reply

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