Eta Carina Mosaic Reprocessed

With all the miserable weather we’ve had lately, I’ve had no chance to get the rig out under the stars to capture more photos of different targets. So I decided to try my hand at processing the Eta Carina mosaic that I did back in March.

I used the same raw images as before, but stacked and processed them in a totally different way.

Using Sirilic, I stacked each set of images individually to create 4 panels which were gently processed (ie, stretching, green noise removal, etc) before being converted into PNGs and then stitched together with AutoPanoGiga (aka APG).

APG is a very powerful (and now free) piece of software for creating panoramas. I gave it the four PNG files, tweaked a few settings and generated a perfectly aligned and colour-balanced image.

This ‘base’ image went into Siril, and was split into two files (one of the nebula without the stars, and one of the stars by themselves) with StarNet++. I then processed these two images with Affinity Photo to enhance them before combining them back into one image. I did a little bit of further processing before arriving at the image below.

Eta Carina Reprocessed

You can download the latest version of APG from https://download.kolor.com/apg/stable/history

Register it with the following user name and activation code: