M97 - The Owl Nebula

[kirkster501]

M97 - The Owl Nebula, March 2020.

Eight hours of exposures Friday night. LRGB. TEC 140 refractor and Atik 460 CCD camera.

20 x 10 minutes luminance

15 x 5 minutes each in RGB

Astrodon filters.

Very hard to control the star to the upper right.

Edited March 31, 2020 by kirkster501

[Craney]

"2020. 8 hours of exposures"    

Blimey..... are you on the ISS  !!??

Great picture btw.     I didn't realise the Owl looked so good in broadband.  

[ollypenrice]

Lovely. If you could add some OIII you'd be delighted by it...

This is a really tight capture. Well done.

Olly

[kirkster501]

I have 9x10mins of OIII Olly.  I tried to put a HOO on top of it but it didn't work.  Interesting idea to overlay just the OIII on top.  Will have a go at that tomorrow.  Thanks for the idea.

[ollypenrice]

2 minutes ago, kirkster501 said:

I have 9x10mins of OIII Olly.  I tried to put a HOO on top of it but it didn't work.  Interesting idea to overlay just the OIII on top.  Will have a go at that tomorrow.  Thanks for the idea.

I wouldn't add it on top. In Photoshop I would give it a very hard stretch while keeping the background to the same level as this image. It doesn't contain fine detail so don't be afraid to give it heavy NR. Then I'd add it it to green in blend mode lighten and save that as 'OIII to green.' Next add it to blue in a new iteration, also in Blend Mode Lighten, and save as 'OIII to blue.' If you then paste 'OIII to blue' on top of 'OIII to green' you can use the opacity slider to balance the green-blue contribution of the OIII. There is a significant outer OIII shell around the Owl.

Olly