M16 - SHO, the Pillars of Creation

Image Description and Details :

This is a Narrowband image of the iconic M16, NGC 6611, using the Sulphur, Hydrogen, Oxygen (SHO) Hubble Palette convention.
Central to the image are the “Pillars of Creation” as detailed in the famous Hubble Space Telescope image.
The result was very different to my previous work with M20 and I have to say, much easier to get an aesthetically pleasing result.I firstly removed the magenta hue. The blue and gold colours were there from the outset but I enhanced these whilst subduing the green. Overall the result is, I think, in keeping with other reference images that use the Hubble palette.
I used Starnet and then Photoshop, using Kevin Morefield's process to end up with a high quality starless image. From there I was able to apply a number of processes such as HDRMT, LHE, and Unsharp Masking, with judicious use of denoising as well as Curves Transformation to improve the sharpness, definition and contrast, evolving the colours to the classic Hubble palette appearance.
I initially added back the SHO stars, dealing with the usual pink halos, but subsequently reprocessed my RGB data to add back the RGB stars. This gave a more natural and colourful appearance to the stars, which integrated very well. I subdued the stars with Morphological Transformation coming to what I think is a nice balance.
Data capture: 2021-08-13 to 2021-09-09
OTA: C14 EdgeHD
Mount: MX+
Camera: SBIG 16803
Filters: Astronomik 50mm unmounted
Lights: 25.5 hours of integration
Ha: 17 x 1800 secs
OIII: 17 x 1800 secs
SII: 17 x 1800 secs
Bias: 35
Darks: 35
Flats 20 per colour channel per camera change
RA/Dec Coordinates
RA 18h18m45.96s
Dec -13°47'55.59"

Copyright: Niall MacNeill