Posted by wallflower 3 days ago
Telescope: William Optics UltraCat 76 Mount: Sky-Watcher Wave 150i Camera: ZWO ASI2600MM-Pro
No one has ever or could ever observe a nebula with zero stars in the frame.
Amazing movie and the end credit visuals WERE incredible!
If by "not real", you mean "you removed the stars so it no longer reflect reality!", then real photograph doesn't exist. For example, OP uses narrow-band filters, and it's common to map H-alpha wavelength, which is red, to green in the images. Does that make it unreal?
In the end, astrophotography is more art than science; the goal is more about producing aesthetically-pleasing images than doing photometry. Photographers must take some artistic license.
“StarNet is a neural network that can remove stars from images in one simple step leaving only the background. More technically, it is a convolutional residual net with encoder-decoder architecture and with L1, Adversarial and Perceptual losses.”
Fine, but is still art photography with heavy processing. Not to criticize the amazing work of Rod Prazeres, who has now commented on this thread.