NGC 6888 - H-alpha/OIII bicolour

[Hallingskies]

Equipment: ATIK 460EX, Vixen 114mm f5.3 ED114 refractor, NEQ6 mount, guiding with Lodestar X2/PHD

Subframes: 20 x 300s H-alpha, 16 x 450s OIII, 20 flats for each channel, hot pixel removal in Astroart (no darks).

The H-alpha and OIII stacks were registered in AstroArt and then taken into PaintShop Pro (sorry folks, I don't do Adobe or PI) for noise and star reduction, and curve tweaking.  I made a false green channel by layering the two stacks and hitting the "multiply" option.  The three channels were then RGB combined in Astroart, with the final colour image slightly contrast adjusted in PSP.

The OIII envelope shows up quite well but it otherwise all looks a bit flat to me.  I think I'll try and get some RGB for star colours before I finally put this one to bed.

 

 

[John78]

PSP - thats a blast from the distant past!  Gimp is very good open source PS clone and the latest versions handle 64bit depth FITS files and 32bit RGB's, most photoshop tutorials are directly translatable.