IC1396 - The Elephant Trunk

[cfinn]

This is 5 hours with my Esprit 120ED, QHY268M and the new Baader ultra-narrowband CMOS optimised SHO filters. Really pleased with the results!

This is also first light with the new Esprit 120 0.77X reducer. Stars are not perfect into the corners, so I have a bit more work to do on backspacing. Probably needs another 0.5-1mm.

[Notty]

Wow. That is beautiful. Was my first NB attempt and I was very disappointed. What ratio/how much SHO data went into it please? I struggled to harvest much S&O when I tried.

[cfinn]

48 minutes ago, Notty said:

Wow. That is beautiful. Was my first NB attempt and I was very disappointed. What ratio/how much SHO data went into it please? I struggled to harvest much S&O when I tried.

Thanks! I collected equal amounts of integration time in each. The trick is to up-weight SII and OIII in the combination because they will always have much weaker signal than H-alpha. If you use equal weightings the image will come out very green.

I used APP for the stacking and processing and basically followed the tutorial below, which explains everything very nicely.

 

[Mike73]

Lovely image, really nice colours.

Mabula's video was very interesting as well. Adding luminance to the combination to lower noise was a great tip, actually I've learnt a lot from that video.🙂

 

[Lee_P]

Great image, looks really crisp.

[cfinn]

On 30/08/2021 at 22:11, Mike73 said:

Lovely image, really nice colours.

Mabula's video was very interesting as well. Adding luminance to the combination to lower noise was a great tip, actually I've learnt a lot from that video.🙂

 

Thanks! And absolutely, I learned quite a lot from this as well. I created luminance with 80% Ha and 10% each of OIII and SII which seemed to work well.