Starless heart of the Heart Nebula in SHO Hubble Palette

[Menno555]

I'm not a real big fan of starless images but the heart of the Heart Nebula has some very cool structures plus I have enough data for it, all shot in December 2021. So made it my first starless processing
I've got time enough for it too cause the clouds here are just keep on coming now for months

On viewtopic.php?t=4903 is all the capture data.
I did use less SII captures with this stacking though: the first night capturing did had some structure visible but really minimal. With those added I had less noise but also less structure. So I now only used the 2nd set with way more SII in it but a bit more noise.
For making it starless I used the updated StarNet++ v2.0. This new version is a big improvement over the first version! See viewtopic.php?t=5075 for more info and download location of StarNet v2.0.

Menno

[timh]

Hi Menno,

It is a great tool isn't it? The only practical problem that I find with Starnet is that after subtracting stars from the OIII and SII there are often 'ghosts' left behind from where the brighter stars were excised- and of course my Newtonian bright stars have spikes too. It is not a problem with the HA because the HA signal is so much (5-10X) stronger. So before combining the three channels back into the single NB image I spent some time with the clone tool excising artifacts from the SII and OIII. I don't like doing that because you have to be careful not to introduce more artifacts in the process of doing it. I was curious as to whether you found the same? I actually made an image very similar to yours (I suppose that it is not too surprising that it should be similar ) but with RGB stars put back in - it is not bad but some minor artifacts around some of the stars.

https://www.astrobin.com/full/2cers7/0/


But starnet certainly now my preferred way of working with these SII regions since it allows you to work separately on the nebula and star images before (usually) recombining them.

Tim

[Menno555]

Thanks Tim!
And yes, I tried with clone tool and content aware tool. But I did find that it ads too much "made up" areas.
Removing the stars already is a kind of "artists interpretation" and for me that gets even more so when those steps are added.
And for me Ha gives the most "ghosts". Probably because I use a color camera? SII gave the most clean image when it comes to that.

Menno