Elephants Trunk nebula in Ha & OIII

[GordonH]

Hi

I have been lucky to have two clear nights on the trot and since my neighbours have chopped their tree back I can shoot the northern skies earlier in the year, as the moon is back I thought I would get back to my preferred imaging of narrow band and have a crack at a close up of the Elephants Trunk nebula even though it is still quite low in the sky from where I live at this time of year. I did 4 hours of Ha data on Thursday and managed 5 hours of OIII last night. This was taken with the Takahashi FSQ106ED at f5 and Starlight Xpress SXVF H9 (a great camera considering its small chip size, relatively low pixel count and no set point cooling). All sub frames are 30 minutes and auto guiding was done with a lodestar and OAG using dithering, I used 5 second guiding exposures. The processing is basically multiple iterations of levels followed by several contrast curves (slight 'S' shaped curves. A final shadows/highlights adjustment was made and colour adfjustments made to tone the bright reds down. No sharpening filters or noise reduction was used. All raw frames were calibrated with darks and dark subtracted flats. I will be adding the SII data at the earliest opportunity. The Ha channel can be seen on the 'Nebulae 2' page of the image gallery of my website Imaging The Heavens - Home Page as well as a previous HST version of this subject taken with the BRC-250.

A full size high resolution image can be seen at the following link IC1396 - Elephants Trunk nebula in Ha and OIII photo - Gordon Haynes photos at pbase.com

Now that the summer nebulae are starting to appear the majority of my imaging will be narrow band until next March

Thanks for looking

Best wishes

Gordon

[martin_h]

I like this a lot, can't wait to see the full narrowband it will give something to aim at

[SlipperySquid]

Love the detail and the subtle changes in colour. A beautiful image and really well processed! Thanks for sharing.

Matt.

[dc509]

Very nice image

d

[Shibby]

I really like this image! It looks nice and smooth considering you didn't use NR. Also, the colours look really natural - you must have some good processing skills

[Ant]

Really like the Elephant trunk, thats a lovely image. I'm looking forward to giving this another go

Did you just combine the Ha and OIII or did you assign them to R and B and do a fake green?

Cheers

Ant

[GordonH]

Really like the Elephant trunk, thats a lovely image. I'm looking forward to giving this another go

Did you just combine the Ha and OIII or did you assign them to R and B and do a fake green?

Cheers

Ant

Hi Ant

Thanks for the comments, I used Ha for red, OIII for green and 80%OIII with 20%Ha for the Blue channel (this was done in Maxim DL), I then made some colour adjustments in photoshop to tone down the bright reds

Best wishes

Gordon

[keithmrris]

Great pic well done!

[steppenwolf]

I really like this rendition - this object has responded very well to the two filters.