Heart of the Heart - Ha collected with my OSC

[gorann]

Last night, with the full moon up, I collected 46 x 5 min of Ha with my cooled color OSC (an ASI 071 MC pro) and a Baader 7nm Ha filter on the Esprit 150. I now added this to 31 x 10 min of RGB data that I collected in March with a Canon 60Da and an ES 127ED. I added 50% Ha to the red channel and then also used it as Lum. The data will probably be used for a two panel mosaic, since a lot of interesting stuff got left out below the image. The sky is supposed to be clear tonight so hopefully I can add the second panel, probably with some overlap so I get extra data to the centre of the image.

Stacked in PI and processed mainly in PS, with some deconvolution in PI. No NR applied to the Ha image but some to the colour image.

C & S most welcome!

[peter shah]

lovely work Goran, very crisp with super tight stars

[gorann]

13 minutes ago, peter shah said:

lovely work Goran, very crisp with super tight stars

Thanks a lot Peter!

Yes, using Ha as lum gives tight stars with a big risk of halos around them from the underlying RGB, so I did what I think some call tone mapping. I removed all stars from the RGB data using the Dust & Scratches filter in PS and then used clone stamp and Gaussian blurr to remove any remaining traces of them. Then I added Ha as Lum and finally used a star mask from the Ha layer to cut out the stars from the RGB data and paste them onto the HaRGB image to bring the star colour back. I also added 50% Ha to the red channel.