IC 1848 - Soul Nebula

[cfinn]

The Soul Nebula in SHO (Hubble Palette). 

Around 9 hours with my Esprit 120ED, 0.77X reducer, QHY268M and Baader ultra-narrowband CMOS optimised filters.

Full details on astrobin.

[Allinthehead]

This is a top class image, the detail is wonderful and processing is spot on. Lovely muted tones too.

[tooth_dr]

Exactly what Richard says, a fabulous image. 

[mackiedlm]

Again what Richard said - first class.

[tooth_dr]

How are you finding the haloes @cfinn?  I appreciate there aren’t any bright stars in this image. I’ve the same filters and have pretty bad haloes in Oiii but also visible in Ha

[cfinn]

Many thanks all! My processing takes a step forward with each image I think. Stacking and selective colour is done in APP. I have been using the new StarXTerminator plugin for Photoshop, which I find works really well to remove the stars. Noise reduction is then carefully applied in Topaz and the stars added back in afterwards.

The stars are still not perfect into the corners with the new Sky-Watcher 0.77X reducer. I've been making adjustments down to 0.1mm and it's still not exactly there, though maybe this is as good as it is going to get. I am currently using three 0.3mm M48 spacers to add 0.9mm extra back focus to the standard setup, which accounts for the 2mm filter thickness. I would be interested to hear of other experiences with this reducer.

[cfinn]

1 hour ago, tooth_dr said:

How are you finding the haloes @cfinn?  I appreciate there aren’t any bright stars in this image. I’ve the same filters and have pretty bad haloes in Oiii but also visible in Ha

@tooth_dr I have exactly the same. Halos are present on Ha and OIII, but SII seems fine. See the three 60s test images below on Merak, which is a magnitude 2.37 star. I am a bit disappointed given all the hype around these filters, but I will probably stick with them. I can't justify the cost of Chroma/Astrodon myself, and if I switched for say, Antlia 3nm, I am not convinced I would get a better result. What I have found is that halos disappear from the Ha images for stars at around magnitude 3 and below, but they persist for OIII down to magnitude 5 or 6. What is interesting is that my Baader Green and Blue filters have worse halos than these!

Edited November 26, 2021 by cfinn

[tooth_dr]

27 minutes ago, cfinn said:

@tooth_dr I have exactly the same. Halos are present on Ha and OIII, but SII seems fine. See the three 60s test images below on Merak, which is a magnitude 2.37 star. I am a bit disappointed given all the hype around these filters, but I will probably stick with them. I can't justify the cost of Chroma/Astrodon myself, and if I switched for say, Antlia 3nm, I am not convinced I would get a better result. What I have found is that halos disappear from the Ha images for stars at around magnitude 3 and below, but they persist for OIII down to magnitude 5 or 6. What is interesting is that my Baader Green and Blue filters have worse halos than these!

 

I appreciate you taking time to reply with images and I very much agree it's disappointing given all the hype.

 

 

Edited November 26, 2021 by tooth_dr