More data or processing skills limiting ?

[smr]

Hi all,

I've got 13 hours on the Iris Nebula so far and I understand that there's quite a lot of faint dust in this region of Cepheus and imaging from a Bortle 5/6 sky is going to make for a challenging target but I thought I might be able to get more of a result than I am currently.

I can see some of the dust surrounding the Iris by doing some stretching but that brings with it noise. I'd imagine I should be able to bring out more of that dust without the noise and over-stretching with more data, if I aim for around 20 hours maybe?

But with 13 hours I am wondering if there's data in the stack and an image which can be shown but at the moment isn't by lack of my processing skills. 

I wonder if anyone wants to have a look to see if they process something sufficient ?

Here's what a stretch looks like... you can see some of the dust around the edges of the frame and around the Iris. But trying to pull these out is proving quite difficult in an RGB image.

Iris Nebula 13h12m 199 Lights.TIF

Here's the stack

 

Iris Nebula 13h12m 199 Lights.TIF

[tooth_dr]

I couldnt do much, still learning, here is my effort, thanks for posting this, nice colours in the data.

 

[happy-kat]

Do you know what the dust is, is it ha, and if so would you have captured it?

[MarkAR]

12 minutes ago, happy-kat said:

Do you know what the dust is, is it ha, and if so would you have captured it?

Had a quick skim through google and it looks like Ha or Infra Red might bring the dark dust out more.

[happy-kat]

Had a process, first pass, colour is not as good on the Iris as the above example, but ok with the cloudy stuff

[tooth_dr]

43 minutes ago, happy-kat said:

Had a process, first pass, colour is not as good on the Iris as the above example, but ok with the cloudy stuff

Thats a good job.  I did mine in 5 minutes and now looking at it again, it's too light!

You also have that light colour banding in the middle, i couldnt get rid of it.

[happy-kat]

Thank you. There is much to like and much to fiddle more with to get right, but then first pass usually shows what the fiddling needs to be. That central area needs a fresh go as it is a bit ringed.

[smr]

Well you're both certainly more advanced at processing than I....

Edited May 13, 2020 by smr

[smr]

So which programs are you using to process? 

[happy-kat]

I used StarTools then irfanview just to make a smaller file size png to share here.

[smr]

I think something in between both your processing effort's would be quite desirable. Can I ask what your processing techniques were ?

[happy-kat]

what software are you using please?

startools my typical workflow is

bin 50% / crop / autodev to see what is there / wipe / autodev with controls used / decon / colour / hdr reveal dso core / sharp (wavelets) / tracking off / repair stars / denoise

Edited May 16, 2020 by happy-kat