Hell, that is outrageously good and the stuff at the dim end of the tail must be seriously dim. Its a lovely piece of work.
So what are they doing that everyone else isn’t?
Can I assume they take superb flatfields, remove the stars, remove sky gradients and then work on the tail with a very non-linear stretch and noise suppression before draping it back on one of the original images?
Perhaps they takes the longer exposures to catch enough signal from the sky (that the tail is similar in brigtness to) so when they subtract the sky theres enough signal left to avoid it being horrible grainy.
I sort of assumed they did short exposures for the bright in-close fine detail and long exposures for the extended tail…
Sneaky is best and all that.
