HOO narrow band image of the soul nebula IC1848

[timh]

Took the opportunity of clear skies around the February full moon to try out some narrow band imaging and to experiment with processing

Image below is an empirical PixInsight Pixelmath concoction of redchannel : HA, green channel : 0.25 X (0.9 O3 + 0.1 HA), blue channel : 0.25 X (0.8 O3 + 0.2 HA) based upon the criteria that 1) the stars should end up mostly white and 2) there should be a visible difference between areas that were almost entirely HA and those where O3 signal was also present. The 20% HA contribution to the blue channel is supposed to mimic the contribution of the undetected but, assumed to exist, hydrogen beta that is normally associated with HA. Then further processed with SCNR (to remove most of the green pixels), MLT to smooth and then Curves and Affinity to improve contrast and saturation.

Skywatcher 200 mm Newtonian F5, Baader field flattener, Pegasus Focus control, Ioptron CEM 70 mount, PHD2 guiding with ZWO ASI 120MM and 8 x %0 finder. SC livestacking and capture filtered by brightness and FWHM, 35 frame -10 C darks and 100 frame flats captured in SC

Astronomik OIII 6 nm filter, Optolong HA 7 nm filter (ZWO drawer)

ZWO ASI 294 MM PRO camera running at - 10C

55 x 2 min of HA at gain 124 and 63 x 2 min of O3 also at gain 124. Seeing was surprisingly good with many frames indicating FWHM of ~ 2.5 arcsec (at 0.95 arcsec/ pixel).

I rather like the newly formed star clusters in this object that are carving out the centre but with such a narrow field of view only the very ends of some of the star-forming 'pillars' are visible. I look forward to combining this with RGB to make it all look less artificial but was pleasantly surprised by just how much can be done with just narrow band and even when the moon is out

TimH

[Menno555]

By the looks of it, your experimenting was rather fruitful
Nice capture.

Menno