vdB 152 and dusty friends in Cepheus

[symmetal]

A very colourful area, vdb 152 itself is also called the Wolf's Cave Nebula. I've left off the LDN and Barnhard labels from PI annotation as they are way off in location. B175 is the 'pillar' above vdb 152 At the top left is the remains of the planetary nebula Dengel-Hartl 5, discovered in 1979, while the large red circle segment at the bottom left is part of supernova remnant SNR 110.3+11.3.

There are three apparent galaxies just inside the SNR ring which don't appear to have any designations.

Most images of this area seem to be very colour saturated with not so much of the fainter background detail. Before star removal processing this lack of detail is perhaps not surprising.

3 hours 20 mins of 90sec exposures, RASA 11, ASI2600MC on EQ8-R. Procesed in PI and PS. There being little to no actual sky background it took a bit of experimenting with DBE and ABE to get something which didn't show noticeable gradients.

Alan

[symmetal]

Thanks for the likes. 🤗

Would anyone like to comment on whether it looks too overprocessed, or the colour saturation is too high. Some of the bright stars have some odd looking flaring but I think it's due to reflections off the nearby dust. The odd shape bright star to the bottom-right of vdB152 is a double star. The blue 'halo' surrounding it, is I believe primarily due to dust reflections. 🙂

Alan

[wimvb]

On 29/05/2023 at 04:10, symmetal said:

Would anyone like to comment on whether it looks too overprocessed, or the colour saturation is too high

Doesn't look overcooked to me. With so much nebulosity, it's very difficult to do proper gradient removal. The result will very much depend on where you put the samples. But this looks good to me.

[symmetal]

1 hour ago, wimvb said:

Doesn't look overcooked to me. With so much nebulosity, it's very difficult to do proper gradient removal. The result will very much depend on where you put the samples. But this looks good to me.

Thanks Wim. I think I just used default ABE in the end. I wondered about the colour but I tried different different colour calibrations but went with PhotometricColorCalibration as it seemed to give good matching graphs, though I've found when using it on spiral galaxies it can leave them looking very yellow all over. 🤔

Alan 

[wimvb]

I took the liberty of downloading and playing with your image. In histogram transformation I used the "auto zero shadows" button to get a different colour balance (not star colour, but background). This cleared up the colours, separating reds and blues more. I then increased colour saturation for red an blue to get this.

 

And this version when using DBE to change the background.

Edited June 9, 2023 by wimvb

[symmetal]

1 hour ago, wimvb said:

I took the liberty of downloading and playing with your image. In histogram transformation I used the "auto zero shadows" button to get a different colour balance (not star colour, but background). This cleared up the colours, separating reds and blues more. I then increased colour saturation for red an blue to get this.

Thanks Wim to take the trouble. I didn't notice the Auto-zero shadows option. Certainly more varied colours.  I'll have to have a look. I've uploaded the original stack here if you, or anyone else, want to try it from scratch. 😀 It needs to be flipped horizontally for the right orientation.

VdB152.fits

Alan

Edit: I'll be uploading Draco II shortly which may interest you more. 🙂

Edited June 9, 2023 by symmetal

[wimvb]

32 minutes ago, symmetal said:

Edit: I'll be uploading Draco II shortly which may interest you more. 🙂

👍

That's on my todo list

[wimvb]

2 hours ago, symmetal said:

I've uploaded the original stack here if you, or anyone else, want to try it from scratch. 😀 It needs to be flipped horizontally for the right orientation.

Thanks. That gives me something to process while nights are too bright up here.

Here's my first version, very different from yours. I don't process nebulae that often, so it's a bit trial and error.

 

You can download the process list and examine it in PI. The mask that I used is just a luminance mask from the image after star removal. Brought in the black point in histogram transformation (auto zero shadows)

PI_VdB152_Alan.xpsm

Added HDR transformation at the very end, in order to restore some of the detail in the reflection nebula

 

Edited June 9, 2023 by wimvb

[symmetal]

1 hour ago, wimvb said:

Here's my first version, very different from yours. I don't process nebulae that often, so it's a bit trial and error.

Wow! Different to mine. 😲 You certainly have the blue stars reflecting off the dust. I think I relied on PMCC for the colour too much as it seems to have killed the blue again. I'll look over your process list for some tips. Thanks.

Alan