NGC6888 in HOO

[Budgie1]

Well, it's been a while since I last had a good clear night up here, in fact the last imaging session I had was on the 24th May! This is mainly due to twilight all night from May to mid-August, but this year we've been under the conveyor belt of Atlantic Low pressure systems, so there's not been a real clear night until this week.

I managed to get four hours of imaging in total last night (1st September) after a break for passing cloud, it turned into two sessions. I got an hour of 6 minute Ha subs, then clouds for about 45 minutes, then it cleared for the rest of the night and I got another 1 hour Ha & 2 hours of Oiii, which took me to 3:30 am.

Last night was first light with my WO Z73 mkIII & adjustable field flattener which I got from @Rustang over the summer , and to this I attached my Atik 428EX and filterwheel, using Baader 8nm Ha filter & 8.5nm Oiii filter. Captured using ATP and PHD2, I was really happy with the guiding as I stripped & re-greased the HEQ5 over the summer and it was running at an average of 0.82 arc-sec over the session, which is better then I've ever had to date.

There's a total of 1h54m Ha & 2h0m Oiii of 360s subs, stacked & processed in PI using the three XT scripts and GHS, I'd have liked more of the Oiii shell to be showing, but I can add to that as & when.

C's & C's welcomed, as always, & thanks for looking.

[Budgie1]

I had another play around with GHS this afternoon and I think the background dust is more pronounced in this version, along with more of the Oiii shell, although I may have another go at that aspect of it because I'm not too fussed on the colour and the outer shell has faded quite a lot.

[WolfieGlos]

Both versions are great!

Agreed you seem to have lost the OIII shell on the second, but the original image looks a bit green on my monitor in the background. Have you run SCNR and lost it on the second version maybe? 

[Budgie1]

37 minutes ago, WolfieGlos said:

Both versions are great!

Agreed you seem to have lost the OIII shell on the second, but the original image looks a bit green on my monitor in the background. Have you run SCNR and lost it on the second version maybe? 

Thanks Chris,

I didn't use SCNR on this one, I think I lost the shell because I used a different mask for the blue. I've done it again and further brought out the Oiii using GHS. This time I cloned the Oiii image, extracted the stars to leave only the Oiii data, then used Curves to darken the background, finally I applied a blur-mask and this created the mask I used for enhancing the blue Oiii data.  

Overall it just needs more data but I think I'll leave it alone for now.