Light pollution and Cygnus

Two nights ago, the night was clear, so I decided to take some photos of Cygnus. The lens was at 38mm and the exposures were 15 seconds and it was on the widest aperture at f/5.6 and ISO 1600.

The first image below shows what one of the lights were like so then you can see what I had to put up with.

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IMG_6000 by naddieuk, on Flickr

After stacking 34 light frames and 27 darks, and using Iris to deal with image processing. I only need to do a few clicks and get something reasonable. I ended up with the following:

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scalecygnus020211 by naddieuk, on Flickr

I have noticed that in DSS if you apply the changes, then you have something that you cannot work with at all. Comments and criticism are appreciated. I have tried to use Photoshop for image processing, but it took me hours and I got worse results than when I used Iris with a few clicks.

Thanks,

Naddie