I usually shoot nightscapes and not pure astro photography shots, but I liked this one quite a bit.
The processing was fairly tricky as the galactic center is fairly low in the sky around here.
I wanted to bright out the detail in the dust clouds & sharpen the image without completely blowing out the stars (at which makes the image very nervous and in my opinion unnatural).
I’d call the result just about acceptable. The stars don’t look like static and largely retain their colors. But a lot of the relative luminance differences got lost. If someone has some hints on how to do a better job at this I’d love to hear about it.
The basic processing workflow was:
- Darktable to develop the RAWs to 16 bit tiff files
- Hugin to align the tiffs
- Siril to stack the exposures
- Gimp & G’MIC & a lot of patience for processing