This sweeping mosaic follows one of the richest stretches of the summer Milky Way, beginning with the Nest, NGC 6604, and continuing past the Eagle Nebula, M16, NGC 6605, IC 4701, and the Swan Nebula, M17. From there, the view descends through the dense star fields of M24, the Small Sagittarius Star Cloud, to the open cluster M21, the Trifid Nebula, M20, and finally the vast Lagoon Nebula, M8.
The Eagle is home to the iconic Pillars of Creation, while the Swan’s bright arcs trace an immense region of active star formation. M24 is not a single cluster, but a window through foreground dust that reveals a remarkably dense field of Milky Way stars. Farther south, the Trifid combines emission, reflection, and dark nebulosity, while the Lagoon anchors the panorama with its broad clouds of glowing hydrogen and newly formed stars.
This image was captured with Seestar S30 Pro and S50, using a combination of the ZWO built-in LP filter and Otolong L-eXtreme dual-narrowband filters.
I am in the process of collecting SII data using SVBONY SV220 in order to complete a SHO palette rendering.
processing notes:
- All images captured with Seestar S30 pro and S50, over a period of a few weeks. HA data was captured using L-eXtreme, L-Quad, or internal LP filters.
- This is about 25 seperate panels, all individually stacked in Siril (Naztronomy script, 1.4x drizzle, sigma rejection, noise rating) and cleaned (cropped, BG extraction, SPCC, aberation removal), then those panels were stacked with light feathering and star weighting, then post proccessed.
- processing this image in siril absolutely murders my machine (m2 macbook air, 16GB ram) star removal takes about 30 mins. Scunet took about an hour.
- I only did relatively light post work with this, because i wasn’t really intending on sharing, and there’s more data that i plan on collecting.
- post processing was: scunet denoising, statistical stretch, color grading. this was too much data for veralux to handle, so I brought it into pixelmator.
- cropped pixel dimensions are 20833x4317, about 90 megapixels.
- uncropped image is about 3GB, cropped is about 2GB.