Dumbbell Nebula

[Shelster1973]

Finally the skies cleared over sunny Guzz and managed to not only get my 1st solar image but grabbed a whole load of data on Dumbbell and Pacman.

Is made up of 14 x 300s @ ISO 400 lights with 14 darks, 15 flats and 20 bias

Have got the 1st one through PI so far and have had a quick level and curve stretch in PS to give me the following image

Core blown out on this one so will have to address that at a later date when I am more proficient with PI / PS and doing layer masking.

Will be getting the Pacman through this week hopefully.

[Shelster1973]

Another re-visit....

Stretches and curves done in PI, this is RBG portion only.  Have yet to extract a Lum layer and process, that will be next step.  Hopefully can get some more of the fainter stuff out with that.

Full Image

Crop of Nebula

[lensman57]

You have quite a bit of signal that has been buried in the background noise around the nebula which shows the faint halo. You could probably extract this but some clever masking and stretching the data to just gently lift it above the noise.

A.G

[Shelster1973]

Not done the clever masking yet...still working that one out as how to do it (am thinking star mask and range mask combined to then mask out the high signal areas and stretch away on the bits that are left...but that is for another day)

In these images have combined an L layer.

Look a bit different to what I have normally done...not sure if I like them or not, but everyday is a school day and am learning more as I go along

[MarsG76]

Excellent Dumbell... makes me want to go lift some weights....

I prefer the original crop over sharpened version.

[Shelster1973]

Yeah...am kind of leaning to prefering the wispier original crop over the sharpened one, but had to see what it was like adding a sharpened L layer to the image.

As said, next one will be to mask the main core and see what faint stuff I can coax out of the background around it.

[laudropb]

Nice image. Thanks for posting.