A start on the Owl

[ollypenrice]

Disappointing weather so far this week, but a short run on the Owl has been a good test of getting the most out of not enough data! I was very pleased and surprised to find some outer shell in just 6x15 minutes of OIII. This also had 4x10 mins per colour and 9x15 mins Ha, so not quite 6 hours all in. In adding the NB I've tried hard to retain the original colour.

Had I had a sound recorder I could have presented this in multi-media mode because, throughout the night, a Scops Owl was sending his monotonous electronic beep up from the valley.

I think what this now needs is some binned OIII to nail that outer shell and some Lum for the faint fuzzies.

TEC140 triplet Apo, Atik 460 mono, filters all Baader except for an Astronomik OIII, Mesu 200. Processed in AstroArt, Pixinsight, Registar and mostly Photoshop CS3. This is a crop.

 

Olly

 

[kirkster501]

By jove...  Rather splendid Olly!

[alan potts]

Very nice and knowing you it will only get better, I have an owl in my barn that don't need such long exposures.

[Allinthehead]

Very nice start. 

[Rodd]

A strange target--even the very best attempt can appear to be lackluster.  I think you have done well so far.   The scale is certainly appealing.  I'm a bit surprised  that the 3  central stars are so faint.....maybe that is by design.  At any rate, looks good.

Rodd

[ollypenrice]

1 hour ago, Rodd said:

A strange target--even the very best attempt can appear to be lackluster.  I think you have done well so far.   The scale is certainly appealing.  I'm a bit surprised  that the 3  central stars are so faint.....maybe that is by design.  At any rate, looks good.

Rodd

It is an odd one, I agree. We looked at it last night in the 14 inch SCT and it is very faint indeed compared with, say, M27. Regarding the three stars in the nebula, I haven't tried to control them at all. Their colour suffered a bit from the addition of the NB data so I put the pure RGB layer back as a top layer, selected those three stars, deleted the rest of the layer and set the blend mode to Colour so only the colour was re-applied. Maybe I should sharpen them a bit.

We're currently doing a run of Bin 2 OIII for the outer shell. I've done no binning in living memory so it will be a voyage of discovery...

Olly

[Rodd]

43 minutes ago, ollypenrice said:

It is an odd one, I agree. We looked at it last night in the 14 inch SCT and it is very faint indeed compared with, say, M27. Regarding the three stars in the nebula, I haven't tried to control them at all. Their colour suffered a bit from the addition of the NB data so I put the pure RGB layer back as a top layer, selected those three stars, deleted the rest of the layer and set the blend mode to Colour so only the colour was re-applied. Maybe I should sharpen them a bit.

We're currently doing a run of Bin 2 OIII for the outer shell. I've done no binning in living memory so it will be a voyage of discovery...

Olly

In PI you just align and integrate binned data with unbinned data--not sure about PS.  I tried binning the OIII and SII, but not the Ha, once (it was by accident mind you, but still).  There was no need to do anything different.  You will collect more signal binned as you know--which I the point after all.

Rodd