IC1396 nebula including the Elephant's Trunk (c-sho)

[ramdom]

Total integration: 784 minutes/13 hours (31 x 7m for S2 + 40 x 7m for Ha + 41 x 7m for O3).

Camera: QHY163M (16mp mono) CMOS cooled to -15 degrees C.

Telescope: Stellarvue SV70T triplet apochromat refractor @ f/4.8.

Reducer: SFFR70-APO

Mount: Paramount MyT.

Filters: Astrodon 5nm Ha, 3nm O3, 3nm S2.

Software: Sharpcap, PixInsight, Nebulosity, Photoshop CC. (Minimal processing.)

Image resized to 19% in the attachment. Here's the link to the full image:  http://ram.org/images/space/scope/1.4.4.5/ic1396_full_sho_420x40+420x41+420x31_784m.jpg

It has been about a year since I did my last image and although I wanted to play with a colour camera I decided to "retrain" by taking another narrowband image of a target I had gotten partially before with the FC100DF (i.e., IC1396A or the Elephant's Trunk region of IC1396).

--Ram

 

Edited June 12, 2019 by ramdom

[peter shah]

beautiful image

[carastro]

Quite stunning.

Carole 

[Gina]

Amazing and beautiful.

[Jkulin]

Fantastic image!

[steviemac500]

This is what I like about narrowband. You choose your own palette and no one can say you’re wrong. To me, this looks way over saturated and I thought my version was bordering on over cooking. But does it matter? It’s a lovely image that’s pleasing to the creators eye and that’s what matters 👍😀

[ramdom]

steviemac, I agree entirely - it's really more art than anything else with NB but I'd say this is somewhat true of AP in general particularly in terms of the difference between what is collected and what the final output is.  Even when I did my old EAA  with a lodestar X2 and my final image was just the livestack slightly processed, there were some choices I made in colour combinations and what to highlight than not and so on. My Bode's Galaxy is purple for instance...

I've been discussing this issue of processing mono images (and how far off from "reality" we get) and apropos to that and your comment I've been meaning to do this for a while but I really want to put up at least my Ha only images for these in astrobin (and perhaps the O3 and S2 as well, especially in cases like this where I got a lot of decent data). I think if I wanted to stick to reality I'd only use the mono image and if it had be a single image, it would be the Ha image. I think they're beautiful in their own right (and there's no tricks of colour being played there). OTOH, I've shown these mono images to the non-astronomer or AP person and the response isn't the same (and even me from an artistic viewpoint don't find the mono images as appealing but from a scientist's viewpoint, the  minimally processed mono images are the best).  I really appreciate AB for this reason, that it lets you put up different versions of the same image.

 

--Ram

 

Edited June 16, 2019 by ramdom