Here is my first go at this, thanks
@Gordon for the data.
My goals for this process was to try to get the "eyes" of the owl showing up and also get some colour into the stars.
I started with a fairly standard
PI process of
Crop
DBE (several iterations to remove gradients)
PCC (colour calibration and background neutralisation)
I am finding that these
OSC data sets with new geneartion
CMOS dont seem to react well to non linear noise reduction so I did none on this version. I tried a version with noise reduction in linear stage but the background ended up quite nasty
Stretched wit HT
light noise reduction with TGVD
CS for colour saturation (masked to keep background un-touched)
LocalHistogramEqualisation (improve contrast in the nebula)
CurvesTransformation to bring the fainter parts of the nebula and some background galaxies to the fore)
I then took it into Photoshop for a few final tweaks
Increased star colour a bit with carboni's actions
Some tweaking of colour in Camera Raw Filter
Selective Highpass routine to emphsise the "eyes".
Save to jpg.
Giving this;
The background is still not as good as I think it should/could be (still a bit lumpy!) so any suggestions for making it better?
I'm going to give it a go 100% in Photoshop to see where I can get to with that.
Scope: Skywatcher Evostar 80ED (SW 0.85 FR/FF) on a SW NEQ6Pro
Guiding; SW Evoguide 50ED, ASI 120mm mini
Meade 8" LX200 GPS on wedge (Guided with a cheapo 50mm guidescope and a ZWO ASI 120mm mini)
Sharpstar 61EDPH II (with dedicated 0.8 reducer) with wiliam Optics 32mm uniguide
Camera: ASI2600MC pro. QHY 163M with ZWO 7nm NB filters, Canon EOS700D astro mod
Secondary mount: Skywatcher StarAdventurer
My Astrobin
https://www.astrobin.com/users/mackiedlm/