Fighting Dragons of Ara - NGC 6188 Mosaic

[MarsG76]

Hello Astronomers,

Continuing from when I posted the first pane of this mosaic back on 6th June... this time I'm sharing with you the completed mosaic of my "Fighting Dragons of Ara" image. I started working on this image back in May 2022 and completed exposing the data on the morning of 9th June 2022 but only now was I able to spend the time to complete processing of all of my data.

This mosaic consists of four plates, imaged with a QHY268M with Baader Sulfur II, Hydrogen Alpha and Oxygen III 7nm narrowband filters, through a BOSMA doublet ED 80mm F6.25 refractor (500mm focal length) and tracked with a "hypertuned" CGEM mount.

The total exposure time spent on all four panes for this image was 68 hours and the full resolution of the finished image is 48 megapixels, definitely the highest resolution image I have taken to date.

Clear Skies,
MG

 

Edited September 16, 2022 by MarsG76

[newbie alert]

Blooming marvelous...

I envy your southern hemisphere skies😲

[The Lazy Astronomer]

Love it - I really like the colours you've got in there, lots of orangey-red. What colour pallette did you use?

[Elp]

This is an amazing target and great SHO, solid dedication to this one.

[assouptro]

🤯 Mind Blown!

That's bloomin' stunning!!

Thank you for sharing 

Bryan

[MarsG76]

On 10/09/2022 at 03:20, newbie alert said:

Blooming marvelous...

I envy your southern hemisphere skies😲

You astronomers up there have plenty of objects that make us a little green... I guess we can't have it all on this spherical existence.

[MarsG76]

On 10/09/2022 at 04:24, The Lazy Astronomer said:

Love it - I really like the colours you've got in there, lots of orangey-red. What colour pallette did you use?

Thanks for your comment.

The palette I used was the standard SHO configuration, data exposed through Baader 7nm 1.25" SII, Halpha and OIII filters.
Naturally the original image was very heavy in the green hue, so what I did was create a luminance layers from the pre color adjusted SHO as RGB combination, than aligned the colours under that luma layer by first gently using the channel mixer, color selection adjustment did most of the change away from the heavy green than a very slight color temperature adjustment.

 

[MarsG76]

On 10/09/2022 at 18:56, Elp said:

This is an amazing target and great SHO, solid dedication to this one.

The hours added up when not only did I decide to do 4 frames, but also each frame through three filters each. I'm surprised that I had that many moonless/near moonless nights almost in a row to complete the image.

[assouptro]

Hey MarsG76!

What software/s did you use to process this epic mosaic? 
 

Cheers 

Bryan 

[MarsG76]

2 hours ago, assouptro said:

Hey MarsG76!

What software/s did you use to process this epic mosaic? 
 

Cheers 

Bryan 

Hi Bryan,

I used DSS, than Nebulosity 3.3 to star align the plates, Starnet V2 to seperate stars from the nebulosity than finished it all off in Photoshop.

MG.

 

Edited September 12, 2022 by MarsG76