First venture into mono imaging - the Soul Nebula

[GraemeH]

Excited to share my first image from my new QHY294M Pro camera.  It's not exactly Hubble quality as I only captured a couple of hours in total, and haven't yet taken any flats.  Calibrated with darks only for now.  I will over the next couple of weeks be trying to adjust my optical train to find the best backspacing between my flattener and camera and correcting the tilt.  I was very impressed by the tool in N.I.N.A.'s Hocus Focus plugin which has highlighted just how bad my backspacing is currently.

Scope: Skywatcher 72ED
Mount: Skywatcher HEQ5 Pro
Camera: QHY294M Pro
Filter wheel: QHYCFW3
Filters: Antlia Edge series 4.5nm Ha, OIII & SII, and V series Pro RGB (all 36mm)
Capture software: Astrophotography Tool
Guiding: PHD2
Processing: Astropixelprocessor, Starnet++ V2 & Adobe Photoshop

[carastro]

Really good for a first Mono image.  It would of course benefit from applying flats.

I have just done the same image interestingly also with a Skywatcher 72ED, which is a new scope to me.

Would love to see the results of this with flats applied, or is it too late and you have dismantled the camera from the scope? 

Carole 

[GraemeH]

Thank you Carole - everything is still assembled, so I'll take flats before I remove anything to add my newly acquired tilt adjuster and spacers. I wasn't expecting much with only 25 minutes each of OIII and SII, but it actually turned out quite nicely. 

[GraemeH]

I've spent a bit more time today on some slightly more considered editing (although I still haven't had a chance to take any flat frames yet).  I like this colour palette better than my first attempt, but I'm aware it still won't win any awards.

Comments and suggestions for improvement welcome.  Thanks for looking.

Graeme

[Elp]

Looks great. If you want to get rid of the green colour (which interferes with the colour balancing process) you can do a green noise removal on the RGB composited image in Siril and you'll get more of that blue/orange/yellow Hubble look. Sometimes it looks better with the green still in.