IC 1396 - Elephant's Trunk and friends, opinions please

[petevasey]

This has taken a few weeks with all the cloudy weather.  But the last two nights finally let me finish data collection 🙂 IC1396 is riding high in Cepheus at the moment, crossing the meridian almost overhead for me, so although some subs were taken during Astronomical twilight , being narrowband they haven't suffered too much.  This is a mosaic of two images with my QSI 683 on TS quad 65 (420 mm fl).  20 minute subs needed so quite a lot of time.  In the end Ha was two sets of 10 subs. OIII and SII two sets of 6 subs, all 20 minutes each, all unbinned.  So total exposure time 15 hours.  Plus of course time spent messing around realigning the camera etc. for each session.  I've done three different processings, and would very much appreciate comments as to which is the most liked (or hated!)  Hydrogen Alpha used for luminance in each case.  Scanning down, HOS, HOS modified, SHO using Bob Franke's colour changes.

Cheers,

Peter

Edited September 8, 2021 by petevasey

[Stuf1978]

All three are nicely done, but it's the second one for me 👍

[petevasey]

2 hours ago, Stuf1978 said:

All three are nicely done, but it's the second one for me 👍

I'm inclined to agree with you.  And my wife likes that one also so it's no contest 🙊

Cheers,

Peter

[Stuf1978]

29 minutes ago, petevasey said:

I'm inclined to agree with you.  And my wife likes that one also so it's no contest 🙊

Cheers,

Peter

Haha yes wives are usually right 🤔

[symmetal]

Very good. 🙂 I think you would benefit from doing some star halo removal using this tip for photoshop if you have it. It helped with my version having blue halos. The green halos  are a bit jarring and the blue halos show most in the last image joining the stars together making it look like strings of star filaments. 😉

Alan

Edited September 8, 2021 by symmetal

[Tommohawk]

Very nice image - and V2 gets 👍 from me too

[petevasey]

22 hours ago, symmetal said:

Very good. 🙂 I think you would benefit from doing some star halo removal using this tip for photoshop if you have it. It helped with my version having blue halos. The green halos  are a bit jarring and the blue halos show most in the last image joining the stars together making it look like strings of star filaments. 😉

Alan

Thanks for the tip.  Unfortunately I have an early version of Photoshop which doesn't have the command described.  The halos actually appear in the Ha monochrome image.  Almost certainly due to the long exposures under less than pristine skies where the light from the brighter stars is scattered slightly by water droplets..

Cheers,

Peter

[ollypenrice]

Lovely, Peter. Another voter for V2.

Olly

[simmo39]

yep, v nice.  No 2 for me.