7/1/03 M16 Eagle Nebula - REPROCESSED 7/9/03

I've been using this data to practice my processing technique. In particular I was after smaller, tighter stars. To accomplish this I selected and excluded the stars during image lightening in Photoshop. I did this for all channels, and also hit the R, G and B channels with a light gaussian blur as the last step in processing the color channels. I also combined the raw luminesence files differently. Instead of adding all 39 1 minute images (during processing in CCDSoft) I simulated 5 minute exposures, creating 8 frames of 5 1 minute exposures added together, and then median combined the 8 resulting frames. These 2 changes led to smaller and less harshly bright stars with separation between some of the multiple star groups in the image. This exercise has helped improve my Photoshop skills, and has highlighted the need to use guiding whenever possible in order to keep exposure times up and to better register the final images. Original processing on the left, smaller star processing on the right. The color difference was a result of having brightened the blue channel image more the second time.