Hubble Bubble (Toil and Trouble)

[The Lazy Astronomer]

I captured some narrowband data on the bubble and surrounding region a few months back, and have been playing around with it on and off (quite unsuccessfully) for what has felt like my entire life in Pixinsight. 

This is a significant crop of a much larger image - I wanted to attempt something akin to Hubble's 26th birthday image so I had a good idea of the sort of colours l wanted, but try as I might, I couldn't get them how I wanted them. I suspect my data and/or my processing skills are not up to the job (yet!).

Somewhat disheartened, I went all the way back to the raw linear stacks last night and did a relatively quick and dirty process to come up with this. It's not how I wanted it to look in terms of colour, so there may well be additional versions to follow.

Needless to say, I don't think the Hubble team have much to worry about 😅.

Details:

Approx. 12hrs split roughly equally across Ha, Sii and Oiii. 5 minute subs with an Esprit 100 and a 294MM.

Full on magenta stars deliberately left in for the traditional SHO look.

Any comments, critisms or tips greatly appreciated!

[kirkster501]

Very nicely done.   It'd be nicer still if you could remove the stars and process them separately so they are not pink.  Maybe grab some RBG data of the same field and use those as the foreground instead to make it a perfect image.

[The Lazy Astronomer]

2 hours ago, kirkster501 said:

Very nicely done.   It'd be nicer still if you could remove the stars and process them separately so they are not pink.  Maybe grab some RBG data of the same field and use those as the foreground instead to make it a perfect image.

Thanks - I did toy with the idea of doing inverse SCNR to neutralise the star colours, but since my original aim was to see if I could recreate Hubble's image, I decided against it.

That said, maybe they are a little too pink and would benefit a slight hue change.

RGB stars might well be something l do for the wider field image, which also includes M52 so RGB stars would probably look nicer.