An Early bird - first HST palette attempt

[Jessun]

Hello,

I have no idea how this should be done, and I have no idea how I did this. But I had fun, and it's something I really wanted to do before the iconic target disappears for the season, so I'm pleased to have some data to play with.

It's a shame really that OIII and SII has the ability to trash what is actually a half decent Ha base, but what to do - well, capture more probably.

This is my 4 hour Ha, with the addition of 1 hour 10 minutes of OIII and same for SII. All Astrodon - the last two were delivered today :-)

So see this for what it is, a bit of experimenting fun  . All ears for tips and pointers though!

All done with the ED80, with a low flying Eagle in the usual murk and LP with the addition of the Moon...

Thanks for looking!

/Jesper

[Jessun]

And a tweak straight away! Need to get my head around this...

Better?

/Jesper

[Daniel-K]

2nd much better first one is too green.

[iksose7]

Yes, second version has much better star colours and not as green like Daniel said

[Jessun]

Thanks chaps, it's going the right direction then.

Hopefully I can add more OIII and SII. And learn how to actually do this  !

/Jesper

[andyo]

Nice shot I don't know much about narrowband but the second version looks best to me

[Jessun]

Cheers Andy, I don't know anything about it either!!  

/Jesper

[Jessun]

Hmm, lets throw some more data at this!

4 hours Ha (same)

2 hours 30 minutes OIII (up 1h20)

2 hours 30 minutes SII (up 1h20)

This one is as you can see with less pink stars. It's insanely tricky to do a decent HST palette I must say - especially imaging down to 16 degrees alt in moon light! I take a deep bow to all that master it.

Third go then:

[Jessun]

Still not happy, and I also realized one of the pillars almost got lost in the edits above I gave it another go from scratch with more emphasis on the SII data (which is red in these renditions).

The noise started to break things up a bit but I added the original b/w ha as luminance @ 25% and that restored it to a certain degree.

Here we go again... (sorry to bore you all  )

/Jesper

[r3i]

Hi Jesper,

I've only just started on the NB fun myself and still have loads to learn, but there is a technique for removing the magenta tint on the stars (which I understand is typical for this kind of imaging).  I found this page that lists what looks to be a useful workflow for getting the classic Hubble Palette look, but have yet to fully try it myself as I still need to get a decent set of data to work with: http://bf-astro.com/hubbleP.htm

[Jessun]

Mike, precisely that is what I find too. Franke kicks off the tweaks with a really nice initial edit so the tweaks come out well. On garbage like this it just looks like garbage in a slightly different hue...

But I agree it's really good fun :-)

/Jesper

[OutThereSomewhere]

Great set of images and a good thread that is helping me learn. Thanks!

[Uranium235]

How are you using the Ha? As a Lum layer?

Try this:

Ha_L x240m, SII/Ha/OIII mapped as RGB x70min

Put all the effort of sharpness, contrast and low noise into the Lum, then layer in the HST colour. In the RGB layer, try to keep the star sizes small and keep on top of the magenta (by setting the saturation for magenta to zero, maybe more than one iteration), noels actions will help with the star sizes. If things get desperate, you can nuke the star colour by using NR in photoshop (strength = 0, sharpening = 0, colour noise reduction = 100).

[Jessun]

Well, I just processed the RGB in separate layers, flattened and then gave it a dose of the Franke medicin. It got a bit noisy so I reintroduced the Ha which is by far the sharpest of course as a b/w layer, blend mode luminance. It sorted a lot of the noise out.

Thanks for the tips there. Never thought this would be sooo difficult!

/Jesper

[Uranium235]

No prob mate. But to set your mind at rest, it always takes a few attempts to get it right - it certainly does for me

Sounds as though you are doing it the same way I would, except the other way round. If you have 4 hours of Ha, it might be worth using a high pass filter to crisp it up a little.

[Jessun]

The Ha filter simply came delived first, so had some Ha only time, hence the head start. It has stretch, despeckle, highpass, and a contrast tweak as standard.

I'm still in heavy smog so there will always be some trouble with my data despite these excellent filters.

I'm doing more OIII and SII as I type. If only I could get a script that works in Nebulosity... Mine keep crashing the software  ...

/Jesper