NGC688 / WR136 - Spock's Brain

[Herbert West]

Hey, I found Spock's lost brain!

 Site:

 Backyard, rural Poland, Bortle 4.

 Aquisition:

 Three warm June nights. Seeing was quite terrible during two of those, when I was after OIII data.

 Ha- 33 x 300s

 OIII- 74 x 300s

 Gear:

 Telescope: SkyWatcher Maksutov-Newtonian MN190, 190/1000 mm

 Camera: ASI1600MMP,

 Filters: Baader Ha 7nm, Antlia OIII 3nm,

 Mount: SkyWatcher EQ6PRO

 Guider: SvBony 240mm, ASI120MM mini,

 Other gubbins: ZWO EFW, ZWO EAF, ASIAir V1

Processing

This one was a challenge for two reasons:

- showing Ha details while giving the oxygen bubble its proper place;

- trying not to flatten the brightest parts of the nebula too much and preserve details there;

Processed Ha and Oiii in Pixinsight but I've moved the stretched images to Photoshop. I just couldn't get acceptable colors in pixelmath. Also, any attempt at creating luminance seemed to make the picture worse.

Thus, I've tried something new. I've coaxed as much detail as I dared in Ha and Oiii, stretched them with the GeneralizedHyperbolicStretch script and moved on to PS. There, I used the color gradient tool to assign them colors and combined them. Some tweaking with selective colors and levels and here it is.

I'll never be happy with it, though. There's no single best way to show this messy and convoluted nebula :-)

[Shibby]

Superb! I'd say you've managed to preserve all those details while also achieving a nice colour balance.

As I have the same 'scope, your image gives me something to aim for!

[Herbert West]

Thanks @Shibby. Honestly, I'm not completely happy- neither with color nor with details. Seeing was, at best, reasonable (Ha). At worst it was rubbish (OIII). There's a lot of unresolved detail in the OIII spectrum.

I just wanted to see how much more OIII and Ha I'm going to need and cobbled this up. It turned out to be difficult indeed, so I had to find a new (for me) way to put it all together. It was great fun. I ended up with this and people seem to like it way more than I do 🙂

[Shibby]

Don't we always feel that way about our own images...

[Mr Spock]

Looks good to me. You can almost see a 3d effect of the expanding gas bubble.

[Herbert West]

1 minute ago, Mr Spock said:

Looks good to me. You can almost see a 3d effect of the expanding gas bubble.

Out of all the people Vulcans, you'd know, I guess 😉