Herbert West

Thank you @peter shah and @callisto!

Thank you, Martin. It's less known than it should be. As far as dim, large and unusual PNs go, this one isn't among the most difficult. It's fairly bright in OIII, where all the details are. One could get away with ~ 25 hours of exposures with medium f ratio under good sky and get a decent image.

Motch-Werner-Pakull 1 - I've been planning this one since last year. I judged my FOV to not be wide enough to reasonably include the nearby Alves 1 and decided to ignore it in favor of placing the main target in the center. Framing and rotation were done semi-blindly, looking at asterisms, because there's next to no trace of MWP 1 even on 300s subs. However, after stacking data from the first (of many) nights- lo and behold! - Alves 1 was in the corner. I just couldn't crop it out, even if it resulted in wacky framing. Sorry, but not sorry :-) That slight brightening on the right edge isn't an artifact, by the way. There's a fairly bright, elongated OIII structure there and I've managed to just clip its periphery. Pretty picture: Ha: OIII: Frames: Integration: 44h 47′ Antlia 3nm Narrowband H-alpha 36 mm: 313×300″(26h 5′) Antlia 3nm Narrowband Oxygen III 36 mm: 213×300″(17h 45′) Astronomik Deep-Sky Blue 50 mm: 38×30″(19′) Astronomik Deep-Sky Green 36 mm: 38×30″(19′) Astronomik Deep-Sky Red 36 mm: 38×30″(19′) Equipment: Imaging Telescopes or Lenses: Sky-Watcher Starlux 190MN / BK 190MN DS Imaging Cameras: ZWO ASI1600MM Pro Mounts: Sky-Watcher EQ6 Pro Filters: Antlia 3nm Narrowband H-alpha 36 mm · Antlia 3nm Narrowband Oxygen III 36 mm · Astronomik Deep-Sky Blue 50 mm · Astronomik Deep-Sky Green 36 mm · Astronomik Deep-Sky Red 36 mm Accessories: ZWO ASIAIR Software: Adobe Photoshop · Pleiades Astrophoto PixInsight · Russell Croman Astrophotography BlurXTerminator · Russell Croman Astrophotography NoiseXTerminator · Russell Croman Astrophotography StarXTerminator Guiding Telescopes or Lenses: SVBony SV106 60mm Guide Scope Guiding Cameras: ZWO ASI120MM Mini Location: Backyard, Nowa Słupia, Holy Cross Mountains, Poland. Astrometry: RA center: 21h 17m 09s DEC center: +34° 13′ 26″ Astrobin link: https://www.astrobin.com/l1by13/B/ Feel free to post any and all comments, both positive and negative.

Thanks Mandy. I'm partial to pink, purple and some magenta in my HOO images, however far from natural Ha and OIII colors they may be.

Due to very unfavorable weather in Poland during this winter and early spring, gathering enough light for a satisfying image of this relatively dim object took a long time indeed. I'd chosen this Sharpless object not on its own merits, but because my primary targets for 2023 are still too low. Sh2-174 was one of the very few PNs suitable for HOO image available, so I took it without much enthusiasm. It turns out I should've been enthusiastic because it's a fascinating and beautiful nebula. That is, if one's willing to put in enough hours imaging it. Main image: Starless: Ha: OIII: Time & Place: Holy Cross mountains, Poland, Bortle 4, 08.02.2023 - 23.04.2023. Exposures: 1. Ha- 233 x 300 s = 19,46 h. 2. OIII- 207 x 300 s = 17,25 h. 3. RGB – 30 x 60 s per channel. Sum: 38,21 g. Gubbins: Telescope: SkyWatcher Maksutov-Newtonian MN190, 190/1000 mm Camera: ASI1600MMP, Filters: Antlia Ha 3nm, Antlia OIII 3nm, Mount: SkyWatcher EQ6PRO Guider: SvBony 240mm, ASI120MM mini, Accessories: ZWO EFW, ZWO EAF, ASIAir V1 Workflow A. Pixinsight, 1. DynamicCrop, 2. BlurXterminator (next to useless here, no high-frequency details), 3. StarXterminator, 4. DynamicBackgroundExtraction, 5. NoiseXterminator, 6. GeneralizedHyperbolicStretch in many incremental iterations, with noise reduction along the way. B. Photoshop 1. Gradient Map on Ha i OIII, 2. Levels on both channels, 3. Export to Pix, slight HDRMultiscaleTransform 4. A bit of Gaussian Blur, 5. Local Contrast Enhancement from Astronomy Tools, 6. Major resamples 7. Delicate noise reduction with TopazDenoise, with masks, no sharpening, 8. Hue/Saturation tweaks, 9. RGB stars via Screen. Clear skies!

Time for another one of Cygnus' jewels. This time it's PN G75.5+1.7. It's a fairly young planetary nebula in the nearest neighborhood of NGC6888. It's visible in Ha as well as in OIII. It's subtle yet striking- nearly perfectly symmetrical, unblemished bubble floating among dramatic clouds of hydrogen and oxygen. Presented in bicolor (Ha = red, OIII = blue). Starless: Ha: OIII: Imaged from my backyard in rural Poland, Bortle 4 in July 2022. 1. Ha- 57 x 300s. 2. OIII- 136 x 300s. Gubbins: Telescope: SkyWatcher Maksutov-Newtonian MN190, 190/1000 mm Camera: ASI1600MMP, Filters: Baader Ha 7nm, Antlia OIII 3nm, Mount: SkyWatcher EQ6PRO Guider: SvBony 240mm, ASI120MM mini, Other stuff: ZWO EFW, ZWO EAF, ASIAir V1 Processed and stretched in Pixinsight. Channels combined in Photoshop with some additional color, contrast and saturation work. Pseudo-RGB stars are made from HOO (R=Ha, G=.8xO+.2xHa, B=O) + some color tweaks, stretched separately and inserted as a layer in PS.

Thanks for your kind words Olly!

Thank you very much!

Thank you. Channels were combined in Photoshop after coloring them with a simple gradient map and tweaking a bit with levels. This method is extremely elastic, although I've not done much further work on colors- what I got was magenta/violet/pink with some splashes of red and it looked ok as it was.

This is the weird and wonderful oxygen nebula around WR134 - a huge and extremely bright Wolf-Rayet star in Cygnus. Starless: OIII: Ha: Imaged from my backyard in rural Poland, Bortle 4 in July. Ha- 63 x 300s. OIII- 175 x 300s. Gubbins: Telescope: SkyWatcher Maksutov-Newtonian MN190, 190/1000 mm Camera: ASI1600MMP, Filters: Baader Ha 7nm, Antlia OIII 3nm, Mount: SkyWatcher EQ6PRO Guider: SvBony 240mm, ASI120MM mini, Other stuff: ZWO EFW, ZWO EAF, ASIAir V1 Processed and stretched in Pixinsight. Channels combined in Photoshop with some additional color & saturation work. Pseudo-RGB stars are made from HOO (R=Ha, G=.8xO+.2xHa, B=O) + PCC + some color tweaks.

Out of all the people Vulcans, you'd know, I guess 😉

Thanks @Shibby. Honestly, I'm not completely happy- neither with color nor with details. Seeing was, at best, reasonable (Ha). At worst it was rubbish (OIII). There's a lot of unresolved detail in the OIII spectrum. I just wanted to see how much more OIII and Ha I'm going to need and cobbled this up. It turned out to be difficult indeed, so I had to find a new (for me) way to put it all together. It was great fun. I ended up with this and people seem to like it way more than I do 🙂

Hey, I found Spock's lost brain! Site: Backyard, rural Poland, Bortle 4. Aquisition: Three warm June nights. Seeing was quite terrible during two of those, when I was after OIII data. Ha- 33 x 300s OIII- 74 x 300s Gear: Telescope: SkyWatcher Maksutov-Newtonian MN190, 190/1000 mm Camera: ASI1600MMP, Filters: Baader Ha 7nm, Antlia OIII 3nm, Mount: SkyWatcher EQ6PRO Guider: SvBony 240mm, ASI120MM mini, Other gubbins: ZWO EFW, ZWO EAF, ASIAir V1 Processing This one was a challenge for two reasons: - showing Ha details while giving the oxygen bubble its proper place; - trying not to flatten the brightest parts of the nebula too much and preserve details there; Processed Ha and Oiii in Pixinsight but I've moved the stretched images to Photoshop. I just couldn't get acceptable colors in pixelmath. Also, any attempt at creating luminance seemed to make the picture worse. Thus, I've tried something new. I've coaxed as much detail as I dared in Ha and Oiii, stretched them with the GeneralizedHyperbolicStretch script and moved on to PS. There, I used the color gradient tool to assign them colors and combined them. Some tweaking with selective colors and levels and here it is. I'll never be happy with it, though. There's no single best way to show this messy and convoluted nebula :-)

I have a second-hand MN56 that I originally bought for a stupid low price for imaging, intending to use it with the 533. It would work ok-ish. Small chip and short optical train (no filter wheel) would do the trick. Then, however, I managed to get a good deal on ASI1600 + wheel + LRGBSHO filters. So, what was I to do? I bought a second-hand SW MN190 🙂 That left me with the MN56 for visual use and it's fantastic, but I still wonder how the MN56 would perform with a camera. Please post pretty pictures if you make any!

Bad weather and Covid-19 isolation forced me to turn to reprocessing my old data. In addition, I had to give my wife some sort of Valentine's Day gift while we're all unable to leave home. Enter IC1805. Any day when I can explain spending hours upon hours on my hobby as doing it for my lovely wife is a good day. Even better, she was very happy with the "gift" 😉 Now, all the colors... What I aimed for is diversity, with red, orange, yellow, green, blue, magenta-ish and teal all distinguishable. Intensity and saturation are just the byproducts. This is classic SHO combination but with H and O LinearFitted to S and preserved green. Tweaked subsequently with Curves and lots and lots of masks, primarily made from O and S stacks and range masks. I'm not too happy with RGB stars... Stars are the most difficult thing to get right for me. Gear: EQ6PRO TS65Q ASI1600MMP ASIAir V1 EAF EFW Filters: Baader Ha, OIII, SII, Astronomik DeepSky RGB Subs: Ha: 128x300s OIII: 136x300s SII: 118x300s RGB: 50x30s each Darks, Flats, Dark Flats. November 2021, rural Poland, Bortle 3-4 Workflow (99,9% Pixinsight): Preprocessing: dark and flat calibration using the WBPP script; NormalizeScaleGradient; ImageIntegration. A. Linear processing S, H, O for RGB channels. A.1. Mure Denoise on S, O (variance 0.3, cycles 30) and H (variance 0.2, cycles 30) A.2. DynamicCrop on S, H, O A.3. DynamicBackgroundExtraction A.4. TGVDenoise with mask on O, S- medium intensity, and H- low intensity. A.5. MultiscaleMedianTransform denoise with strong mask on O, S and H- with even brighter mask. A.6. LinearFit H and O to S. B. Luminance layer processing (Ha stack) B.1. Copy Ha stack from A.3 stage. B.2. Very mild TGVDenoise with mask. B.3. Very mild MultiscaleMedianTransform deonoise on wavelt layers 1, 2, 3, 4 with strong mask. B.4. Deconvolution round 1 with custom global dark/bright settings, local support- 30 iterations. B.5. StarXterminator to remove stars and create stars only image. B.6. Deconvolution round 2 with custom global dark and global bright settings, no local support, increased wavelet regularization, 2 iterations. B.7. Subtle MultiscaleLinearTransform sharpening on wavelet layer 3 only. B.8. Very mild MultiscaleMedianTransform denoise with very bright, low contrast mask on wavelet layers 2, 3, 4 to smooth out some middle-low frequency noise from deconvolution and MMT. B.9. Pixelmath to add stars back. B.10. HistogramTransformation. B.11. HDRMultiscaleTransformation (EZHDR script, good enough). B.12. Starnet2 to remove stars and create stars only image. C. Channel combination C.1. LRGBCombination C.2. Invert image. C.3. SCNR to remove magenta cast arround stars. C.4. Invert image. C.5. Starnet2 to remove stars. C.6. HistogramTransformation. C.7. CurvesTransformation- a lot of it, with a bit of SCNR, with range masks and masks made from O, S and LUM stacks, modified with Curves and HistogramTransformation, with wavelet layers 1, 2, 3 removed with MMT. C.8. LRGBCombination to add luminance. C.9. Again- lots of CurvesTransformation. C.10. A little bit of LocalHistogramEqualization with very low contrast and low amount (scale 32 & 64). C.11. DarkStructuresEnhance, low amount. C.12. Very delicate ACDNR with bright, low contrast range mask to protect the background on chrominance and luminance. C.13. Export as tiff. C.14. Topaz Denoise with the following settings: I masked Melotte15 and other high-snr, bright, high-contrast areas to avoid sharpening, because even with “Enhance Sharpness” set to 1% the results there are totally unacceptable! However, Enhance Sharpness set to just 1% preserves all those very dark fluffy bits in dark areas. Whereas, when set to 0% they get extremely blurred. Medium brightness areas seem to be untouched by sharpening so there should be no artificial details introduced by Topaz here. C.15. Import to Pix. C.16. A little bit of Curves. C.17. Pixelmath to add stars. C.18. Clone image with stars, EZStar Reduction on clone (A.Block Method). C.19. Mix original image with stars with C.18 with Pixelmath: .7*reduced_stars+.3*org_stars D. Stars D.1. Pixelmath to combine R, G and B stacks. D.2. PhotometricColorCalibration with background neutralization- but it didn’t go well. D.3. HistogramTransformation. D.4. Starnet2 to extract stars only. D.5. SCNR to remove green (yes, the stars were greenish). D.6. Slight Convolution. Feel free to ask whatever questions you want answered and post any and all critique. Thanks in advance!