IC1396 SHO in twilight

[Spongey]

Thanks to the lack of astro-dark I've been sticking with narrowband imaging on the recent clear nights, which has been rather successful despite the non-perfect sky conditions.

The following image represents ~9 hours of SHO data split evenly across the three channels. As I am manually focusing and don't fancy staying up all night doing so, each filter was shot on a separate night. This allowed for a decent amount of time per channel, though the Sii and Oii data had to be noise reduced pretty heavily. Thankfully these channels were only used for colour data, with the exception of the small portion of calamari in the bottom right corner, which was worked into the otherwise Ha heavy lum. Not my best framing I will admit, but I was mainly interested in the central object for this one. 

Processed in PixInsight and Lightroom, with the following pixelmath formulae for the colour channels:

R = Sii*.6 + Ha*.4

G= ((Sii*.6 + Ha*.4)*.3) + ((Ha*.2 + Oiii*.8)*.7)

B= (Oiii*0.8 + Sii*.2)*.5 + Ha*.5

Taken with my Samyang 135mm at f/2.8 and QHY268M.

Constructive criticism welcomed!

[david_taurus83]

Oh I do like that!

[symmetal]

Very good. The choice of colours makes it stand out nicely, and the stars have a fairly 'natural' colour too. 🙂

Alan

[geordie85]

Very nice.

I see you've even managed to capture part of the squid nebula down in the bottom right.  You should be proud of that as it is incredibly faint.

[tooth_dr]

Fantastic image, sorry I missed it first time round.