NGC6960

[jiberjaber]

I finished with capturing data about a week ago and since then I have started and scrapped numerous attempts to the point of giving up almost - I'm close but still not 100% happy. The main problem I had was the resultant NB image was far far too busy with stars etc and I couldn't decide on a colour scheme!

This is my first NB image after getting a mono camera, it's been a bit of a mission!

Captured over 5 nights

ZWO B 31mm: 8x120" (gain: 139.00) -15C bin 1x1
ZWO G 31mm: 10x120" (gain: 139.00) -15C bin 1x1
ZWO Ha 31mm 7nm: 22x600" (gain: 139.00) -15C bin 1x1
ZWO L 31mm: 8x120" bin 1x1
ZWO OIII 31 mm 7 nm: 21x600" (gain: 139.00) -15C bin 1x1
ZWO R 31mm: 4x120" (gain: 139.00) -15C bin 1x1
ZWO R 31mm: 6x120" (gain: 139.00) -15C
ZWO SII 31mm 7nm: 40x600" (gain: 139.00) -15C bin 1x1

So about 15 hours combined NB & WB.

After pre-processing (all aligned to a master Ha sub) I ran mure denoise on the separate integrated filters, DBE and linear fit. I then combined the NB channels and did a stretch. 

R = 0.5*HA + 0.5*SII
G = OIII
B = 0.85*OIII + 0.15*HA

For the WB I followed much the same process with a photometric colour calibration but the stretch was simple to give more stars than nebula.

I ran the NB image through Starnet++ in PI with a stride of 32. This gave a very starlessimage!

I used the blend script and the RGB image to bring a few stars back to the picture. I wanted to mask and play with the colours in the nebula plus try some HDR so see if I could pull out the detail visible in the Ha subs, making a mask proved problematic but I eventually used a luminance mask and some eraser action in photoshop to get some sort of mask to allow only the nebula to be altered.

So this is the current revision of the image.  I was hoping for something crisp but colourful like the OIII sub - I wonder if it was my selection of combination of the NB subs that has left me feeling this way but I really don't have the enthusiasm at the moment to reprocess to see if that was the case! LOL 

 

The OIII sub...

[MarkAR]

Lovely final image. (For now 😉)