IC1805 Heart Nebula in Ha (two panel mosaic)

[Filroden]

Keeping faithful to the "one clear night per month" rule, the British weather finally aligned clarity with a new moon. I was able to set up at dusk (a crazy 16:00 around here) and be fully aligned, focused and on target by astro-dark (an equally crazy 17:50). SharpCap really does make polar alignment a breeze. I was within an arc second on azimuth and bang on for altitude according to the results!

Everything played nicely except for two things:

• PHD2 crashed but I was luckily outside with the scope when it happened and the sub it affected went from a FWH of 1.8 to about 2.0 so I still kept it
• SGP performed a meridian flip around 21:50 and clipped the tripod! I need to work through this one. I can't remember setting the time back to GMT but my gotos were all spot on so I'm assuming it's not as simple as a time zone thing?

Image details:

• Taken on the evening of 10 November 2017.
• Equipment: Skywatcher Esprit 80 with the ZWO 1600MM-C using an Astrodon 3nm Ha filter mounted on the AVX with OAG guiding
• Exposures: 18 x 240s and 20 x 240s at unity gain
• Processed: Pixinsight and Photoshop

Anyway, with some minimal processing, here's my heart:

    

I'd appreciate any feedback. It's noisy and I just can't get the contrast I'm looking for without making it look "HDR". I prefer the inverted image for contrast even though they are identical other than inverted.

[r3i]

You share the same moisture laden, light polluted skies of NE England that I do, so I take my hat off to you in getting such a great image.

The only thing that I have done with this and similar targets is to suppress the stars, which I find are a bit of distraction from the nebulosity - this however is a personal preference and may not be the right thing to do. I've done this using the Dust and Scratches tool in PS, but there may be better ways of doing it (and I'd love to know if there are).

[Filroden]

4 hours ago, r3i said:

The only thing that I have done with this and similar targets is to suppress the stars, which I find are a bit of distraction from the nebulosity - this however is a personal preference and may not be the right thing to do. I've done this using the Dust and Scratches tool in PS, but there may be better ways of doing it (and I'd love to know if there are).

Thanks for the feedback. I’m imaging this evening - two nights in a row! - so I’ll look at star reduction tomorrow. 

[Allinthehead]

Nice