Veil complex

[halli]

Hi

Spent a bit of time on the Veil with my TS71 and ASI1600mm - cool recently - just about managed to capture most of it with the TS71 fov.

I am experimenting without guiding and with high gain short subs on the 1600.   I am using 40s just to be on the safe side with a NEQ6 but probably could go to 60s or so.

I took a set of Lum, R,G,B,Ha and OIII 

The full compliment is as below

Lum  100 @ 20s  unity gain

RGB  60 each @40s  300 gain

Ha    400 @ 40s 300 gain

OIII   340 @40s  300 gain

The Ha and OIII were the most dominant and detailed subs. 

For processing I used PI and used the superluminance function to combine all the above  filter masters and performed a LRGB combine.

I then injected the Ha and OIII into the red and blue channel respectively using the NBRGBC script in PI.

I therefore have two versions one with the narrow band introduced as part of the superluminance only and another with further narrowband exposure into the red and blue channel  - please see below

 

LRGB only with superluminance for L 

 

 

LRGB with enhanced red and blue channel using injected Ha and OIII

 

 

Most of the narrowband detail should also be in the first but using the narrowband again in the red and blue channels as per the second image has certainly enhanced the colour and definition of the structures.

However the first has got real RGB star colours whereas the star colours in the second have been blasted by the red and the blue channel introduction of Ha and OIII !

I wish I knew of  a way of replacing the star colour in the second with that of the first !

I am interested in what peoples views are of these techniques and what the preference is re the two images and whether there are any other workflows with narrowband and RGB combination.

One issue in the use of the ASI 1600mm for short exposures is the gigantic amount of data to process in the calibration and stacking phase with up to 400 subs for one filter.  

Both DSS and PI struggled but eventually succeeded but the best software for doing the calibration and stacking by a mile was Astroart which cut through all the subs in no time with really good results !

However my experience was that the lack of the need for guiding and the consequential knock on advantages of this compared with the downside of the amount of processing was the easy winner  - although a machine with a decent processor is required !  

I would appreciate any comments and views on the above.................good, bad or ugly !

Thanks

[wimvb]

Great image!

As for keeping the RGB star colours: have you tried Kayron Mercieca's method of combining Ha (and OIII) with RGB?

http://www.lightvortexastronomy.com/tutorial-combining-lrgb-with-narrowband.html

Sometimes I have had better results with this method than with the NBRGB script.

I think you can also safely try a gentle star reduction in the very end of processing. (Coincidentally, Kayron has a tutorial on that using the same veil complex: http://www.lightvortexastronomy.com/tutorial-reducing-star-sizes.html )

[DaveS]

I too have found AstroArt very good for stacking.

I hope to have a bash at this soon, but will be going NB only, either SHO or NHO depending on what an initial survey shows.

The second does it for me, the first looks very washed out, possibly due the L diluting the colours.

[halli]

Thanks for the comments Wim and DaveS

I have used the Light Vortex resource before and found it very good.  I will certainly take a look at the LRGB and star reduction work flows - thanks for the links