NGC 6960 and Pickering's triangle now in bicolor

[Luis Campos]

Hi guys,

 

Finally I finished my NGC 6960 project, it took me over 2 weeks to get the Ha and OIII data, from full moon to wild fires...everything was against me, but managed to get some prety decent data from my suburban backyard

The final image consists in 21x1200 secs. in Ha ( Baader 7 nm 36mm filter) and another 14x1200 secs. in OIII (Baader 8 nm filter) captured in 4 diferent nights ranging from very good transparency to average, the transparency has a large impact even with NB filters, especially OIII.

Here I have two versions, one with a more typical bicolor colors scheme (HA/OIII/OIII) and another with more "psychadelic" colors with a scheme of (HA/HA-OIII blend/OIII) and then used a mix of 50/50 HA and OIII for luminance on both images, a good bit of star reduction to emphasize the nebulas and there you go

 

Setup used was:

 

Altair Astro 200mm f/4 newtonian (stopped down to 175mm f/4.6 to get better star shapes), mono & TEC cooled Canon 550D, Baader Ha and OIII filters, EQ6 go to mount, autoguided with a 50mm finder and ASI 120MM

 

I resized the images at 50%, still on the "full size" there's A LOT of details to take in, make sure you check the full size versions

 

 

Here the typical HA/OIII/OIII version (now with fresh eyes I see I have a blue rim on top, I have to crop that out):

 

https://www.flickr.c...eposted-public/

 

Here the HA/HA-OIII/OIII version:

 

https://www.flickr.c...eposted-public/

 

 

Here the Ha channel only (this was still only 13x1200 secs but showing a lot of stuff):

 

https://www.flickr.c...eposted-public/

 

 

Here the OIII channel (14x1200 secs:

 

https://www.flickr.c...eposted-public/

 

 

In case anyone wishes to give a try, here goes the two callibrated Ha and OIII stacks, you will have to deal with slight stars elongation due to slightly mismatched data sets and a slight gradient around the frame with the OIII data, the darn filter produces this with all my Otas and I don't know why...

 

The Ha stack:

 

https://www.dropbox....h dark.tif?dl=0

 

The OIII stack:

 

https://www.dropbox.... darks.tif?dl=0

 

Hope you guys enjoy

 

Cheers,

[PatrickGilliland]

Nice work  Luís,

Very well put together with that nice liquid feel to the nebula, managed the stars well also.

Paddy

 

[Luis Campos]

Many thanks Paddy

 

Cheers