NGC7000 in LRGB

[Space Oddities]

Yesterday was moonless for a few hours, so I thought I'd do some LRGB for once. I always liked the true colors of the North America nebula and I was wondering if my light polluted skies would allow a nice LRGB image. Turns out, it works great  

This is only 1 hour and 15 minutes worth of data. As always the NoiseXterminator plugin in Pixinsight did wonders! 

Sadly I'm having very bad halos. I noticed these on my narrowband filters earlier (except the OIII one!! How about that...), and the LRGB seem to suffer from this as well. I'm very disappointed, I thought the Baader filters would be halo free...

Acquisition details:

• ZWO ASI1600MM-Pro, L: 10x180, R: 5x180, G: 5x180, B: 5x180, gain 139, -10°C
• William Optics RedCat 51
• RainbowAstro RST-135
• Acquired with the ASIAIR Pro
• Processed with DSS and PixInsight
• From Nantes, France (Bortle 7)

Edited July 24, 2022 by Space Oddities

[ollypenrice]

It's great, especially for such short integration time.

Have you processed the halos to reduce them? If not, they don't look bad to me. Small telescopes will always produce larger stars and 51mm is a pretty small aperture. There are some bright stars in this field.

Since you have Noise X, have you considered StarX? You can remove the stars and replace them with stars given a much softer stretch.

Olly

[Space Oddities]

1 hour ago, ollypenrice said:

It's great, especially for such short integration time.

Have you processed the halos to reduce them? If not, they don't look bad to me. Small telescopes will always produce larger stars and 51mm is a pretty small aperture. There are some bright stars in this field.

Since you have Noise X, have you considered StarX? You can remove the stars and replace them with stars given a much softer stretch.

Olly

Thanks Olly! I'm also surprised such a small integration time is sufficient. The NoiseXTerminator plugin really helped here!

What surprised me is that halos are also visible on some not so bright stars. I even took apart my EFW to check if they were mounted correctly... 

I do have the StarX plugin, it usually works very well but in this case the result wasn't very good. Some parts of the image have too many stars, and the biggest ones are always difficult to process for star extraction plugins... So I processed with the stars, and you're right, it's not so bad actually!  No picture is perfect anyway, and I'll improve my processing skills with time. Pixel peeping and impatience simply don't rhyme with astrophotography.

Right now my priority is to produce a decent picture out of PixInsight (processing has never been my strong suit), and I have to say I'm starting to get better! I never really liked the user experience, but I'm getting used to it now and I have some kind of workflow that I can build on now.