Cygnus area in Widefield - Now in Colour

[Gina]

Been processing data I took back at the beginning of October with my ASI1600MM-Cool camera and Asahi Super Takumar 28mm f3.5 lens plus Astrodon 3nm Ha and OIII filters - I tried SII as well but there was nothing usable.  EQ8 mount - unguided.  This is the result of processing 100 120s Ha and 64 120s OIII light frames with gain of 500 and about -30C sensor temperature.  Poor and duff frames were weeded out using Blink in PixInsight.

Captured in APT and pre-processed in PixInsight with the BPP script with matching calibration data.  Then further processed in PI to register the Ha and OIII masters followed by DynamicCrop to remove the black borders, subtracting background gradients with DynamicBackgroundExtraction (DBE) and matching histograms with LinearFit.  The Ha and OIII images were then combined into a colour image using PixelMath. 

The result was somewhat disappointing so this was saved in TIFF format and transferred to Photoshop for post processing using curves to match up the histograms which were very different at first.  The result was a much improved colour image which I saved in PNG format for upload here.  Here is the final image though I think there may still be room for improvement.

[cosmojaydee]

Absolutely wonderful image Gina, great to see all your hard work is paying off , brilliant 

[Gina]

Thank you very much

[RichLD]

Yay! Top stuff Gina 

[Stu]

Wow Gina, that's lovely! One of my favourite areas of the sky  

[Gina]

Thank you both

[Gina]

A slight touch-up in Photoshop.

[steppenwolf]

That's really lovely, Gina so much to feast the eye on. Lovely tight stars too.

[Gina]

Thank you Steve

[wimvb]

Lovely imge, Gina. I've been following your struggles with the setup. It seems it's starting to come together now.

One remark: the NA nebula and Pelican are very "solid". If there is any detail in the subs, you can try HDRMultiscaleTransform with a lightness mask to get some more detail in this region.

Just an idea.

[Gina]

Thanks Wim - I'll look into that as there is detail there   I also have that area in a narrower view from my 135mm lens which I have yet to process.  I'll be posting the result when I've processed the data.

[PatrickGilliland]

Nice Gina - like the colours and the processing.  Nice result all round.

Paddy

[Taff]

Nice work Gina' lots of details in your capture of the Cygnus area.Mark