M81 M82 Starless Image Help!

[The Thing]

OK so I'm playing with 122x240s subs 600mm f4, ASI294MC Pro OSC camera from two nights leading to a large cropping factor. Stacked in Pixinsight WBPP script on defaults.

Perceived problem: The galaxies with stars are too bright, they are easily seen on the subs without stretching. I have tried all sorts of stuff but have concluded I have to deal with the stars and galaxies separately as many do. I haven't to date so it's a steep learning curve. Starnet 2 produced this lovely pair of galaxies which have been processed as drizzle_ABE_SCC_SN2Starless_EZdenoise_Decon_GSH_ASinh_SCNR which means something to PixInsight users. As you can see there is a load of IFN and galaxy detail, I've tried not to overdo the stretches and there is loads more that can be done.

What I can't work out is how to get the stars part of the image using Starnet and process that.

[Ivor]

That looks like some great data, I might try Asinh to see if I can pull more data.
There are so many ways to approach this in Pixinsight, so you should get a few ideas.

Are you running starnet or starnet2 the latter is better. With Starnet2 you can select "create starmask" and get that at the same time.

After I've processed the two images separately, I use combine(starless,stars,op_screen()) in pixelmath.

Hope that helps

[Carole]

Sorry can't help as don't use Starnet or Pixinsight. 

If using Photoshop l would have grabbed a copy of the stars before removing them, or kept a copy of the original at least.  Not that l do star removal but l have added RGB stars to NB inages. 

[The Thing]

Thanks Ivor, I used Starnet2 and have discovered that starmask is actually the stars. I was panicking a bit after a couple of hours mucking around. I have tried simply adding + the images in pixelmath but that's very crude. I'll try combine().

I have all stages saved Carole, I just a case of working out what to do with which bit.
I think the next thing I'm going to do is restack after working out which sub is causing the cropping, the fields between the nights should be identical as first night sub was used to provide target coordinates on the second. Then split the stars out and process again.