The first DSO for a while, NGC 7380, the Wizard

[JSeaman]

It has taken me nearly 4 months to get enough data to produce this - NGC7380 or the Wizard Nebula

The hydrogen alpha was taken over 8 nights throughout July with 4.5 hours of usable data. 2 multisacle median transform, a light one across the whole image followed by a luminance mask to push the background. Then a layer with the unprocessed image was used as a selective luminance (masked by selective colour to only affect stars) for some of the bigger stars. Ringing was removed with another layer with 100 on the contrast dial then masked this in round the edges. Registax was used to add some wavelets then a minimum filter in PS to recover the stars.

I had to wait until September for some darkness and usable skies. 2 good nights of O3 data followed which gave just under 7 hours of data. I added 30 5 minute darks, 20 bias and 20 flats to this. The O3 was simply stretched and a star reduction was performed

S2 was all last night, I got about 6 hours in total with a bit of moon to fight with but good enough to pull out a picture

 

[Dinglem]

That is 4 months well spent, such a good image, I would be doing cartwheels if I produced anything like that.