Image data was captured by Jeff Woods and offered up as a challenge for an astrophoto processing group. The image is a combination of individual red, green, blue and Ha frames.

The processing started by aligning all the frames using Images Plus. Next the red, green and blue frames were combined into a single RGB image. This image was stretched using the digital development function in Images Plus. Next the Ha frame was stretched using the same settings. The RGB image was blurred to reduce the noise and then split into individual R, G, B and luminance frames. The Ha frame was then scaled so that the background and nebula was about the same level as the RGB luminance. This step is important as it prevents the colour from being washed out in the final image.

The luminance frame from the RGB image was discarded and the Ha frame was used in place of the luminance and the R, G, B and Ha frames were recombined to form the final LRGB image. This was then loaded into Paint Shop Pro and noised reduced using a masked and layered approach. Some stacking errors caused double stars in the upper left corner of the Ha frame, these were fixed using a masked, shifted darken combine method. Finally the image was reduced for web display and sharpened using Focus Magic.