Horsehead and Flame

[mackiedlm]

So this is my first time capturing this wonderful object. The word "iconic" is, IMHO overused and abused these days but this, for me anyway, is a truly Iconic view and one I have wanted to capture since i first started AP.

Due to technical issues it ended up as only 3 hours of 180s subs but I think its come out Ok for that. Captured on Jan 1 and only my second CMOS image. I had to crop out a bit below and left of the flame because of a nasty gradient that I could not get rid of in PI. I have probably overdone the noise reduction a bit and may go back and try again at some point.

SW Evostar 80ED on a NEQ6

Optolong L-Enhance filter

Altair Hypercam 269c

Stacked in APP/ Processed in PI

C&C welcome

[Stargazer33]

That's really nice. The 'curtain' behind horsehead is showing lots of detail.

[The Admiral]

+1 to that!

Ian

[Marvin Jenkins]

I don’t normally comment on this sort of thing as I am sooo new to AP but I love that image. The definition really works. On an expert AP side I might be entirely wrong but I do tend to row against the tide in life. Good stuff, I would be well happy with that image hanging on my wall.

Marvin

[MKHACHFE]

First of all, absolutely gorgeous image. Kudos. Beautiful.

Second, I agree that this nebula is a bit iconic/special. I got my first glimpse of it with my stock DSLR last autumn from a Bortle 2 location and just last week revisited it from my Bortle 6 garden.

I find it quite a hard target to process, but the results both times were far beyond what I expected to get. The whole of the Orion area is just so beautiful in my opinion.

 

Great work mate. 

[mackiedlm]

Thanks for the positive comments folks.

@Marvin Jenkins I'm still pretty new at this myself, really only 18 months at it properly and this is my first dedicated camera. So its complex and can be frustrating but when it comes together it is very rewarding.

 

 

[MartinB]

That's a very nice clean HH.  Looks great

[The Admiral]

On 20/01/2021 at 17:16, mackiedlm said:

Optolong L-Enhance filter

I'm intrigued. This filter has two narrow passbands (though it's called a tri-band ), but this image looks like a normal RGB image rather than NB. Is this a mix of the two, or is this just what you get with 3 hours using this filter? What am I missing here?

Ian

[mackiedlm]

1 hour ago, The Admiral said:

I'm intrigued. This filter has two narrow passbands (though it's called a tri-band ), but this image looks like a normal RGB image rather than NB. Is this a mix of the two, or is this just what you get with 3 hours using this filter? What am I missing here?

Ian

Yes I know exactly what you mean, and indeed other targets I have done with this were more clearly "NB type" images (see my monkey head for example). My process on this on was the same as the others - stacked in APP with the extract Ha and Extract Oiii algorithms to give a mono each for Ha and Oiii. Processed then in PI using normal NB methods and recombined as HOO using Pixelmath. (I may have thrown some Ha into the green channel - cant remember!)

For the sake of full disclosure 😃 I did take the final image in to Photoshop and did a selective colour adjust on the Flame as it was too red.

But no RGB included at all. It was nearly 90% moon so without the L-eNhance I'd have got nothing. I may consider getting some RGB to put into the stars (which I think is the only "tell" that this was a filtered image) but that requires a clear moonless night which out here are like hens teeth!

Thanks for the feedback.

[peter shah]

that's a lovely rendition