Alright this thing is stupid faint. Due to my apartment’s wonderful horizons and high light pollution I decided to photograph a lot of high declination narrowband targets. This one just happened to be in a region of the sky while I was in between shooting brighter things. I only noticed it when scanning through stellarium with the DSS red survey on. There is apparently some Oiii in it based on the few other photos online, but this would have been too challenging (and time consuming) for me to do from bortle 8. There are also a few background galaxies.
Alright this thing is stupid faint. Due to my apartment’s wonderful horizons and high light pollution I decided to photograph a lot of high declination narrowband targets. This one just happened to be in a region of the sky while I was in between shooting brighter things. I only noticed it when scanning through stellarium with the DSS red survey on. There is apparently some Oiii in it based on the few other photos online, but this would have been too challenging (and time consuming) for me to do from bortle 8. There are also a few background galaxies.
Captured over 24 nights from Jan-April 2023.
Places where I host my other images:
Instagram | Flickr
Equipment:
TPO 6" F/4 Imaging Newtonian
Orion Sirius EQ-G
ZWO ASI1600MM-Pro
Skywatcher Quattro Coma Corrector
ZWO EFW 8x1.25"/31mm
Astronomik LRGB+CLS Filters- 31mm
Astrodon 31mm Ha 5nm, Oiii 3nm, Sii 5nm
Agena 50mm Deluxe Straight-Through Guide Scope
ZWO ASI-120mc for guiding
Moonlite Autofocuser
Acquisition: 65 hours 30 minutes (Camera at half Unity Gain, -15°C)
Ha - 383x600"
R - 35x60"
G - 35x60"
B - 30x60"
Darks- 30
Flats- 30 per filter
Capture Software:
PixInsight Processing
BatchPreProcessing
StarAlignment
Blink
ImageIntegration
DrizzleIntegration (2x, Var β=1.5)
Ha Linear:
DynamicCrop
DynamicBackgroundExtraction
NoiseXterminator
MaskedStretch to 0.1 background
StarXTerminator starmask made, then subtracted from 0.3 Gray image and colvolved
Previous image used as a mask to stretch nebulosity without stretching stars
Repeated previous steps a few times to bring Ha and Oiii images nonlinear
RGB Linear:
DynamicCrop
DynamicBackgroundExtraction
ChannelCombination
JimmyMath to add Ha to RGB image
SpectrophotometricColorCalibration
HSV Repair
DeepSNR
Slight SCNR green
AcrsinhStretch + HistogramTransformation to stretch nonlinear
Nonlinear:
added stretched Ha to stretched RGB via LRGBCombination
DeepSNR
shitloads of CurveTransformations to adjust hue, lightness, saturation, etc. (some with lum masks)
MLT chrominance noise reduction
ColorSaturation to selectively saturate the nebula
more curves
LocalHistogramTransformation
even more curves
Invert > SCNR > invert > SCRN (star masked) to remove excess greens and magentas from stars
guess what more curves
BlurX to sharpen up the stars
another round of MLT noise reduction (targeted at medium scale chrominance noise in the nebula)
Resample to 70%
DynamicCrop again
annotation
The subtlety of the textures is precisely what made me stand up and take notice. I realized what was going on here and am properly impressed.