First go at some SHO - IC1396

[discardedastro]

First crack at a pure narrowband colour image. Armed with only one Baader Ha filter at home, I captured about 70 exposures of OIII and 20 exposures of SII (more to follow) from iTelescope's T21 telescope in New Mexico to produce a SHO dataset.

Post-processed pretty simply in PixInsight - each set of lights was processed separately to a master (usual cosmetic correction, subframe selection, etc) and then integrated using ESD or LinearFit with local normalisation. Masters were DBE'd, registered/cropped to the Ha master, and linearly fit to the Ha.

Colour processing involved ChannelCombination to start, a histogram transformation to get everything stretched out to work with, curves to adjust hue to de-emphasise greens, colour saturation to emphasise the blues and reduce magenta a little, light application of local histogram equalisation to improve contrast on the edge of the clouds, and (non-complete-removal) SCNR and a curves contast pass to finish.

Definitely an interesting process and definitely more to learn - need to get a bigger filter wheel and some more filters to get some better data to work with!