Urban Crescent Nebula

My trusted CGE Pro finally had a failure that I couldn't fix. After some calibration and PEC training I took this as the official first light image. The image serves a dual purpose in that it is an image taken from bright urban skies with an almost first quarter Moon in the sky. I'm working on an urban imaging presentation and the Crescent is a good example of a lower surface brightness target that can still be imaged from the city. To make this a good image it really needs at least triple the exposure time so I could turn down the noise reduction a bit. The longer exposure wasn't to be as it was a Sunday night and I had to be conscious for work the next day.  At about 200 arc-minutes2 the Crescent has a surface brightness of about 22 magnitudes per arc-second2 which is slightly dimmer than a galaxy like M81 at 21 magnitudes per arc-second2. The image compares well with this one I took from a much darker site. I generally find that processing and longer exposures are much better than light pollution filters in most urban locations as the colour balance doesn't shift except for the light pollution.

Object NGC 6888 (Crescent Nebula) RA 20:12.1 Dec 38:21 Date 7 July 2019 Exposure 60 minutes (20 X 3 minutes)  ISO 800 Camera Canon 60Da DSLR Optics Prime focus of a SkyWatcher f/7 Esprit 120 with a focal length of 840 mm Location Bedford, Nova Scotia, Bortle 7 to 8 skies (17 to 18 magnitudes per arc-second2) Processing This image was processed entirely in Images Plus. Calibration, stacking, statistical filter applied to reduce noise before stretching. Masked stretching and split star processing used to enhance the image. Masked noise reduction using a frequency domain lowpass filter applied to the DSO layer and then it was recombined with the star layer. Image binned 2 by 2. Final sharpening, a slight start reduction and a saturation boost rounded out the processing. Since the 60Da has on sensor dark suppression no darks were used in the calibration.