March 6, 2021: Flaming Star Nebula and surrounding; my first HaRGB image

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Last night, with @MartinB's advice on going for Ha-RGB rather than SHO or the like on the Flaming Star Nebula in mind, I grabbed 2 h 40 minutes worth of RGB subs using the ASI183MC rather than the ASI183MM-Pro behind the Sigma 50-100 mm F/1.8 zoom. I would have liked more, but clouds cut the session short. The result after stacking wasn't too impressive:

There is just a little nebulosity visible, and the stars tend to bloat a bit. Nonetheless, some of the blue reflection components are visible, so I decided to combine this with this image:

Which is 2 hours (and 2 minutes) of H-alpha data obtained on February 27 and March 2 with the ASI183MM-Pro. After combining them in Gimp, denoising them in Affinity Photo and another stretch and crop in Gimp, I am quite pleased with the first result

There are still some colour gradients I want to tackle, and I would like to see whether mixing in O-III and S-II data might help, but I am rather chuffed with this first result. More data to get rid of noise is of course also need.

 

[MartinB]

I think that looks great Michael.  Ha is the meat of the image  but the RGB has provided some lovely trimmings making it a delight!

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Just did some experiments by blending O-III into G and B bands and S-II and H-alpha into the R band of the RGB image in APP, then using hue and saturation components of the resulting image together with the H-alpha image as luminance channel to create a Ha-SII-OIII-RGB composite image. I still need to experiment more, but i quite like the result

May have pushed saturation too far. I am thinking of constraining the saturation channel by the luminance channel, so the saturation is only pushed in bright areas, not in the background.

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

21 minutes ago, MartinB said:

I think that looks great Michael.  Ha is the meat of the image  but the RGB has provided some lovely trimmings making it a delight!

Cheers Martin, I do not doubt I will do more of this kind of combined imaging