Curious why my M24-area supernova remnant received 0 judge votes

If it were me, the reasons would be:

• Star bloat throughout the field.

• Aggressive use of saturation.

• Star colours are strange.

• Stars look heavily overprocessed and cut-pasted into the image.

• Odd magenta halos that looks like chromatic abberation, even in places where there are no stars.

  There could be hundreds of reasons why anyone else may choose or not choose an image…

Brian Puhl · Aug 17, 2026, 10:53 AM

I don’t remember seeing this image in my queue, but I can certainly see a few reasons why it would get passed over:

The main one that stands out are the stars. They are clipped in most places, bloated in others, and theres an overstretched blue glow around stars that aren’t even blue

If we overlook the stars and look at the data itself, we can see what looks like possibly clipped narrowband signal added into the image, with an unnaturally balanced black point (too bright).

The data itself is overstretched and very crunchy, lacking meaningful detail. It’s difficult to discern in most places of this image if I’m looking at a detail or an artifact? What I would think were maybe blue reflection nebulae are actually just crunchy blue star halos. There is alot of things wrong with this image, and in my eyes it heavily falls short on just about every aspect.

When it really comes down to it, two things you should take away from this… Do a detailed inspection of your image at every step. Compare it to the last at the pixel level. Did your image get better? Or did it get worse? Noisier? Every slider you use, be it blurx, noisex, curves transformation, etc…. once you think you’ve found a setting you like, back it off by 20%. Even in my own experienced practice I do this for every step. Once you think you’re done, take your final image and put it next to the raw data. Does it actually look better?

Less is more. This statement becomes more true than ever in astrophotography.

Thank you for your very detailed explaination. Although I did pixel level checking for each step, the rule of back off 20% is a very good advice for avoiding overprocessing and I’m always trying to get the edge point, but I’m not the genius to step on it every time, so stepping back is always safer. I’ll follow this rule in my future processings.

Yingtian

John Hayes · Aug 17, 2026, 06:43 PM

I generally try to steer around questions like yours but having just come off of judging the Australian International Astrophotography Prize, I’ll give you a few thoughts. My first piece of advice is to study other IOTD and TP images to better understand what a “highly rated’ images looks like. In general, there are two aspects to highly rated images. The first is overall visual impact. If an image makes you say, “WOW!” when you first see it, it probably has a lot of impact. You asked so, I’ll be direct and brutally honest here: Your image initially made me say, “Ouch!”. The colors are overpowering to the extent that they are obscuring, not revealing, image complexity. That’s contributing to a very flat appearance in the image. It has no depth. A key feature of this region is the “lightning strikes” in the lower left and they are completely overwhelmed and almost hidden by the overwhelming colors. The differentiation between the objects due to the colors makes the object look flat and muddy. The background star field is overwhelming and I’d recommend dialing them back a bit. I’m also not a huge fan of the visual tension between the red and blue colors in the image. If you have a choice, complimentary colors work a bit better when you have such large regions of color. Of course that’s not always a choice so you have to modulate the colors using brightness and tonal variations.

The second aspect to any highly rated image is the technical excellence of the image. That speaks to the quality and colors of the stars, noise control, use of color, background levels, noise control, and image detail—among other things. Your image contains a lot of oblong stars. Furthermore, the stars don’t look “piercing. The data appears to be over smoothed and the background appears to be just a bit high (at least for my taste). The image sharpness is all over the place. You’ve picked up some detail here and there but over all, my first impression is that it’s a big blurry image. Nothing stands out. There is no place that draws my attention and no focal point. The overall framing is not bad but nothing in the image emphasizes that aspect.

Remember, astrophotography, as we do it here, is not science. It is an art project and learning how to be an artist in this medium is super challenging (at least it is for me). Don’t let my harsh review discourage you in the least. Use the advice of others and what you see in highly rated images to learn how to get better. We all have to start somewhere and virtually all of us produced some pretty bad images in the beginning. Be patient, forget about the judges, and spend time learning how to get better. You’ll know how you are doing through comments, likes, and bookmarks…and eventually you’ll know you are on the right path when you start getting more attention from the judges. Just don’t expect that to happen overnight.

Good luck with it!

John

Thank you very much, John. I really appreciate you taking the time to give such detailed and specific feedback.

Your comment really helped me better understand not only the result but also especially the points not only where they are but also to which degree I’m lacking. I’ll definitely keep these points in mind when I reprocess the image and for future submissions.

Thanks

Yingtian