A very minor observation involves the 2 reddish stars to the upper right that was not immediately noticeable.  There seems to be a slight darkening of the background with a slightly reddish halo around them.  Looks like some kind of processing artifact that only affects those 2 stars.  If I look very carefully I do see the same thing on the other bright stars.  On the first image I can see a very faint reddish halo, maybe do to a little bit of haze in the sky at the time.  Looks like a large scale contrast enhancement was applied that makes the galaxy stand out from the background better but which also "enhanced" the slight halo around the very brightest star.  Maybe the saturation before stretching contributed to this.  Maybe a little less saturation before stretching and additional saturation after.  Just a thought. Sometimes I have found things like doing stretching in multiple steps comes out a little better than doing it in one step.

Still a great image!

Thanks Michele.

Greg

Greg

Thanks Greg, I didn't realize I ended up with more detail, but I did want to get the color maybe more neutral and less muddy.   I'll take the detail though!

T

Greg

One more thing I did, is combine my L with RGB in the LAB space.   So I replaced the L in the LAB created from RGB, with my luminance data.

I can clearly use more data to get the far outskirts in my luminance a little better... next year.   

I'm curious what a slightly darker background would look like.  I know, at least with my DSLR images, it's hard to retain a nice gradation with a darker background.  Though that may mostly be due to not having more that 2-3 hours of data and using a broadband LP filter.

Terri