Background

This was the most difficult image for me so far. I worked at the editing all day before I finally had something I was happy with — the 7th version! Part of the reason it was so tough is because of the high noise levels. I cut this project short at 18 hours because brighter winter targets are getting high in the sky, and I want to move onto them. Also, the integrated shot had banding issues, which I’ve never had before. I had a tricky time removing them until I discovered that PixInsight has a utility called CanonBandingReduction that fixed it in literally three seconds!

I normally crop my images in at least a little, but during editing it was obvious I’d captured a fair amount of surrounding nebulosity not often seen in images of the Cave Nebula. So, I kept it wide.