Jones-Emberson 1 in 52 hours (colour version)

[opticalpath]

The planetary nebula Jones-Emberson 1, aka the 'Headphones Nebula'.  I finally added the OIII and RGB data to my earlier monochrome Ha image to produce this colour rendition.

The data for this was captured over many short sessions in mostly mediocre conditions in light-polluted suburban skies. The image was taken with my QSI 583, SW MN190 and Astrodon filters. Total integration time was 52 hours as follows:
Ha 33 hours (30m subs), OIII 7.5 hours (30m subs), RGB 11.5 hours (5m subs) ......  all 1x1.

Processing was a long slog with many false trails and dead ends!  I used Steve Cannistra's method to create a synthetic green channel from the Ha (red) and OIII (blue) images.  Initially this produced a very garish magenta-tinted result that needed a lot of coaxing to get a satisfactory blend of the deep reds, dusty browns, pinks and blue-green central area.  I wanted to use as much as possible of my hi-res. Ha image for luminance in order to get the fuzzy outer regions and this inevitably affected the colour saturation, so there were some compromises.  The narrow-band stars were OK but it would have been a shame not to use all that RGB so it was pressed into service to provide a properly colour-balanced star background.

The version shown here is a crop of the central area, shrunk to 70 percent. 

The wider field has some nice faint galaxies. Click here to see the whole field at full size
http://universalconstant.com/PK-164_Ha-OIII-RGB.jpg

Hope you like it.

Adrian

 

 

[michaelmorris]

That's a stunning image and well worth the obvious considerable effort you put into capturing and processing the data.  Thanks for sharing.

[Davey-T]

Superb image Adrian, one of those objects I've had a stab at in the past but never made much headway

Dave

[pyrasanth]

That's a really good image. I might have a go at this with the C11 Edge & would use my preferred mix of RGB L(x2) & HA. I question whether the use of HA as the L layer was the way to go. Did you not shoot any L?- I would have gone LRGB & integrated the HA into either the Red or green & then balanced the colour but it takes nothing from the fact its a stunning image. The L layer would have enhanced the fainter galaxies as they are mostly dominant in full spectrum visual wavelength colours.

If you face the challenges of light pollution as I do you may wish to give consideration to having an IDAS filter permanently in your imaging train. This has very little impact on narrow band work which was put to me as a question- I reckon the loss is about 1/3 of a F-stop was not much considering the benefit you can get.

I look forward to being able to repeat the excellent standard of your splendid image. Well done.

[opticalpath]

56 minutes ago, pyrasanth said:

That's a really good image. I might have a go at this with the C11 Edge & would use my preferred mix of RGB L(x2) & HA. I question whether the use of HA as the L layer was the way to go. Did you not shoot any L?- I would have gone LRGB & integrated the HA into either the Red or green & then balanced the colour but it takes nothing from the fact its a stunning image. The L layer would have enhanced the fainter galaxies as they are mostly dominant in full spectrum visual wavelength colours.

If you face the challenges of light pollution as I do you may wish to give consideration to having an IDAS filter permanently in your imaging train. This has very little impact on narrow band work which was put to me as a question- I reckon the loss is about 1/3 of a F-stop was not much considering the benefit you can get.

I look forward to being able to repeat the excellent standard of your splendid image. Well done.

Thanks for your comments.  Actually, I only used Ha as luminance at 30% opacity.  Of course, the underlying narrow-band image already included a lot of Ha signal so this was included in the luminosity of the false colour NB image, so I suppose there is indeed a lot of Ha in the luminosity overall!  I did not shoot separate luminance; from previous experience, there is very little signal from the nebula.  However I tried combining all the full-resolution RGB images to construct a pseudo luminance.  The resulting signal for the nebula was weak and really too noisy.  The wispy fringes were completely absent and some of the faint stuff really needs the Ha in order to achieve any kind of usable signal.

However, I agree that the best route for this object is probably a very long RGB (or perhaps Ha-L-RGB) integration, with Ha blended in as you describe.  Possibly the best image of this object ever taken:

http://www.pixinsight.com/gallery/PK164+31.1-CAHA/

was obtained with a 1.2m telescope; exposure was 16 hours RGB and 12 hours Ha.

 

Adrian

[mikeyscope]

Great image Adrian, I don't think you could have done much better considering the weather conditions we have all experienced during past months.

Really nice detail  and you have captured that 'glow' of ionisation within the nebula very well.  

[Physopto]

I will add my "Stunning" to those before me. That is some perseverance!

Derek

[swag72]

I love this Adrian and have been waiting for the colour version since you posted the mono. It's a joy to look at and shows that there are no shortcuts in DSO imaging. If you want a stunning image then you have to put the hours in.... plain and simple, there's no getting away from this. You have shown that the hours pay off for sure

This is a fantastic image and having attempted this a few months ago, my data has been put in the bin... I really do appreciate the difficulty of this target. 

Great stuff

[ollypenrice]

Utterly inspiring. The image is bold and subtle at the same time and an absolute joy to behold. This really does show how to go about astrophotography.

Regarding luminance, where there is little in the way of reflection nebulosity, be it in the blue or because of the dusty stuff, then I don't think luminance brings much to the table myself. Using Ha in luminance when the image is predominantly narrowband is not like using it to iluminate RGB, which I think is a poor idea. Horses for courses.

Superb piece of work without the aid of exotic kit or exotic location.

Olly

[Scott]

mate,  that is superb. never having seen it before I'm not in a position to say anything other than "Well done you"

 

[Tommohawk]

I've never seen this before - its an excellent image! I liked the wider field version too. Top marks for perseverance and end results!

BTW does anyone know if this object shows on stellarium?

[Ruud]

Hi Adrian, thank you for this beautiful image. It's magic!

[Physopto]

15 minutes ago, Tommohawk said:

I've never seen this before - its an excellent image! I liked the wider field version too. Top marks for perseverance and end results!

BTW does anyone know if this object shows on stellarium?

I tried but no go. It will show up in The SkyX but you need to put in PK 164+31.1, (from Wikipedia)

Derek

[opticalpath]

Thanks for all the kind comments, folks.  The processing of this one took about as long as the data capture!

Adrian

38 minutes ago, ollypenrice said:

Utterly inspiring. The image is bold and subtle at the same time and an absolute joy to behold. This really does show how to go about astrophotography.

Regarding luminance, where there is little in the way of reflection nebulosity, be it in the blue or because of the dusty stuff, then I don't think luminance brings much to the table myself. Using Ha in luminance when the image is predominantly narrowband is not like using it to iluminate RGB, which I think is a poor idea. Horses for courses.

Superb piece of work without the aid of exotic kit or exotic location.

Olly

Thanks, Olly.  I agree with you about the luminance, but I think there's a case for a long RGB integration (I mean really long!) to get a better starting point for building the nebula colours.  I had a little of the brighter red stuff in my 3.8 hours each R/G/B but nothing at all to generate the browns, pinks and teal; they all had to be derived from the two NB images ..... and this was the biggest processing challenge.  I wanted to get close to the 'correct' colours if possible, rather than settle for an obviously false-colour image and I think this would have been easier if I had had more natural colour from the RGB to work with.  But there are only so many hours of clear sky in the UK!! 

Adrian

[opticalpath]

1 hour ago, swag72 said:

I love this Adrian and have been waiting for the colour version since you posted the mono. It's a joy to look at and shows that there are no shortcuts in DSO imaging. If you want a stunning image then you have to put the hours in.... plain and simple, there's no getting away from this. You have shown that the hours pay off for sure

This is a fantastic image and having attempted this a few months ago, my data has been put in the bin... I really do appreciate the difficulty of this target. 

Great stuff

Thank you, Sara. 

BTW I did have an earlier version that was  - shall we say - more 'vivid' which I thought might appeal to you , but the extra colour saturation messed up the colour calibration of the stars so I'm afraid that version didn't survive.

Adrian

[Mr Spock]

Just perfect

[toxic]

what a great image  Adrian well done indeed 

[gnomus]

http://youtu.be/o6F6u5TIUbI

[kendg]

The end has obviously justified the means. Beautiful image.

 

Thanks for sharing.

[laudropb]

A very special image. All your hard work has been justly rewarded.

[Pompey Monkey]

Brilliant!

Just the inspiration I needed to give up with my crooked star 71 (which I'll never be happy with) and tune up the old faithful 150 PDS ?

[ScottyT42]

Adrian, that's just inspiring! I'm no expert but I can only assume the sheer complexity involved in setup and post-processing was mind bending. Here was me just looking into what filters to get and I stumble across this. Really impressive.

[pyrasanth]

I've begun the task of considering how to process an image not as a whole but as individual elements. So we could process the stars alone with the best LRGB frames & colour balance. Then work on the niceties of the object we are capturing & integrate the 2 or more layers together. My view of imaging processing has been much to holistic so I hope this rethink will improve my images. 

I know that Olly processes his star backgrounds separately so perhaps he could offer some tips as to how this is done. I guess its a lot harder than imagined as when I remove stars or backgrounds using Straton it damages the faint nebulous objects. I'm thinking alongside Star masks in PixInsight.

[MartinB]

Wonderful image Adrian, I do like the uncropped version, shame to waste those nicely coloured stars which frame the nebula so nicely.  In your combining efforts did you try assigning OIII equally to green and blue?

[Scott]

5 hours ago, pyrasanth said:

I've begun the task of considering how to process an image not as a whole but as individual elements. So we could process the stars alone with the best LRGB frames & colour balance. Then work on the niceties of the object we are capturing & integrate the 2 or more layers together. My view of imaging processing has been much to holistic so I hope this rethink will improve my images. 

I know that Olly processes his star backgrounds separately so perhaps he could offer some tips as to how this is done. I guess its a lot harder than imagined as when I remove stars or backgrounds using Straton it damages the faint nebulous objects. I'm thinking alongside Star masks in PixInsight.

Perhaps a new thread in the imaging processing, tips and techniques might yield more advice.