I "Heart" Astrophotography! IC1805

[eshy76]

Hi everyone,

Christmas Eve was crisp and clear in my neck of the woods, but the moon was also at 96%...time to put those NB filters through their paces!

Heart nebula was the target.

This was the night I wasted 3 hours trying to polar align...but I still got 4 hours integration (20x250s each of Ha/SII/OIII)...should've been 7 hours...tsk.

I processed in two combines - first a "natural" palettte: R = 76%*Ha + 24%*SII, G = OIII, B = 85%*OIII + 15%*Ha. 

Then I gave the Hubble Palette a go (SHO)...cue lots of hue fiddling to mitigate the comprehensive green I first ended up with...still need to improve my skills here it seems...I like it though (this version will be in the next post).

Thanks for looking!

[eshy76]

As promised the SHO version!

[MarsG76]

I "heart" that image...

good work.

 

[eshy76]

Thank you MarsG76!

[RolandKol]

Very nice!!!

And this nebula hates me!!!

Every-time I try "shoot" it, - my tracking goes off... clouds show up and etc and etc... No love....

I have managed to stack it from different small sessions (3+5+2 + etc subs per session)

P.S.

it looks like if you tinker SHO one, - you will manage to get full pallet of colors.

As I see you have PI, - simply apply SCNR (to remove Green) and you will see some straight away.

[eshy76]

Thanks Roland...my nemesis is the Pleiades...something always goes wrong when I try to shoot that one...last week, the clouds rolled in just as I was about to capture the blue data...pretty crucial colour that one for that object!

Yes - I just noticed the blue/purple cast in the bottom left of my SHO image when looking at it on a monitor at work...note to self - halt all processing after midnight! I will try SCNR (seems so obvious now!) instead....I think the actual data is decent so hopefully it will work out well - thanks!

[AndyUK]

Very nice indeed...  and very good considering it was virtually full moon - You've got to love Astrodon NB filters for cutting through it! 

(I'm not sure what process you used for the Hubble Palette process, but I've always found this link quite a useful starting point...)

[eshy76]

Thank you Andy! The Astrodons are little by little justifying the, erm, astronomical expense. But "buy once, cry once", right? What was genuinely impressive was for my quite wide field purposes, the parfocality of the filters is holding up - focused through the Ha filter on M45 and did not touch it for the OIII and SII filters.

Thanks for the link - I'm a Pixinsight user and I only have Lightroom and Photoshop Elements...so I'm trying to do everything in PI...but the principles laid out in the link are definitely helpful.  

[Guest]

23 hours ago, eshy76 said:

Thanks for the link - I'm a Pixinsight user and I only have Lightroom and Photoshop Elements...so I'm trying to do everything in PI...but the principles laid out in the link are definitely helpful.  

Your work is really well done - I particularly like the 3d feel to the centre of the first image (natural colour) above.

As for PixInsight I've have found Light Vortex to be the most amazing tutorial resource I've found - it's helped my processing immensely - I'd have been lost without it as many tutorials can be a bit heavy on thoughts/feelings/intuition instead of simple step instruction combined with brief explanation of those steps.

Again - nice work - hope to image this object myself some day.

David

 

[eshy76]

Thanks David! That's very kind!

Yes, I also have used Light Vortex extensively - I found Pixinsight impenetrable early on and basically processed everything as per their M31 tutorial by rote for the first six months! PI is clicking with me now....I'm starting to move parameters around I would never have touched before!

It seems the one tutorial I hadn't read from Light Vortex was their really simple Hubble palette one! Between that and everyone's really helpful tips here, I think I'll have a much better Hubble image shortly...!

This target is a nice one - really big...a cool adjunct would be a wider field to also capture the Soul nebula in the same frame....or a mosaic of course.

[eshy76]

Thanks to everyone for the useful pointers on the Hubble palette stuff - I've absorbed and gave it another go and came up with the image below. I think I still prefer the original red palette version, but this is now looking more like the Hubble palette and not the green pastiche version I had before!

[RolandKol]

yep.. something not matching here...

it looks like you blurred OIII and SII way too much, some parts even look like painted... It would be interesting to play a bit with your raw files As I have cloudy nights most of the time

[eshy76]

Hey Roland - thank you for the feedback!

I'm struggling at the early stages of narrowband imaging, because it is not "real" colour...unlike LRGB, there is no definitive reference for me as to what the end should look like...which leads me to torture the data - I can see exactly what you mean by some of it looking painted on!

The image popped up in my Lightroom library after Pixinsight processing and I couldn't resist the urge to play a bit more with it in Lightroom's develop settings...that is probably where things took a much worse turn! PI is all about masking and selective processing...whoops!

I will return to this once I have had a go at processing M45!

What is the best way to share the raw files?

[RolandKol]

Place them to the dropbox or gdrive and share thr link