Mike Lewis
Staff Member
So here is the first deep sky image after all the light leak nonsense was fixed. It sure was a lot nicer processing this data without a bunch of mysterious intermittent gradients all over the place.
This object was fun to process, although once again, in order to get the 'Monkey head' portion upright, this turned into a vertical image. In that orientation though, it is actually possible to see the monkey looking to the left in this version
The little blob down in the lower left is a Sharpless object, Sh-247.
This image is made from the 3 common narrowband filters, Hα, OIII, and SII, and mixed using a modified SHO palette with SII in Red, Hα in Green, and OIII in blue. The modification is to tone down the much stronger Hα signal to not overwhelm the palette in green, to allow the other colors to show out and mix together. This was processed primarily in PixInsight with the stars removed to stretch the nebulosity independently, and then data taken separately though RGB filters used to add the stars back in at the near the end of the processing. Palette color tweaking was also done in Photoshop as was star recombination. Final black level and a few more fiddles were performed in Lightroom, where the image was also converted to the final jpg. The image presented here is the reduced size version required by FocalWorld. I will also be posting a full size rendition (the image was drizzled 2x during processing) on Astrobin soon, but decided to give 'first light' to FocalWorld this time around.
As always, comments and critiques most welcome.
ML
Some details from Wikipedia:
NGC 2174 (also known as Monkey Head Nebula) is an H II[1] emission nebula located in the constellation Orion and is associated with the open star cluster NGC 2175.[1] It is thought to be located about 6,400 light-years away from Earth. The nebula may have formed through hierarchical collapse.
Equipment:
QHY268M Camera @ -10C and
Gain:56 Offset:25
Software Bisque MyT Mount
Stellarvue SVQ100 Astrograph Refractor, 580mm @ f/5.8
Antlia Pro Filters (3nm narrowband plus LRGB)
Askar FMA180 Guidescope/ASI290MM
Software:
Pixinsight Commercial Version 1.8
Lightroom CC
Photoshop CC
N.I.N.A. Control Software
Star XTerminator (Russell Croman)
Noise XTerminator (Russell Croman)
Light Frames:
Ha - 56 x 300 secs ( 4 hrs 40 mins)
OIII - 61 x 300 secs (5 hrs 05 mins)
SII - 60 x 300 secs (5 hrs)
Red: 30 x 15 secs (7 mins 30 secs)
Green: 30 x 15 secs (7 mins 30 secs)
Blue: 308 x 15 secs (7 mins 30 secs)
15 hrs 07 mins 30 secs total
Dark Frames:
10 x 15 secs (2.5 mins)
10 x 300 secs (50 mins)
Flat Frames:
10, each filter
Bias Frames:
60
This object was fun to process, although once again, in order to get the 'Monkey head' portion upright, this turned into a vertical image. In that orientation though, it is actually possible to see the monkey looking to the left in this version
The little blob down in the lower left is a Sharpless object, Sh-247.This image is made from the 3 common narrowband filters, Hα, OIII, and SII, and mixed using a modified SHO palette with SII in Red, Hα in Green, and OIII in blue. The modification is to tone down the much stronger Hα signal to not overwhelm the palette in green, to allow the other colors to show out and mix together. This was processed primarily in PixInsight with the stars removed to stretch the nebulosity independently, and then data taken separately though RGB filters used to add the stars back in at the near the end of the processing. Palette color tweaking was also done in Photoshop as was star recombination. Final black level and a few more fiddles were performed in Lightroom, where the image was also converted to the final jpg. The image presented here is the reduced size version required by FocalWorld. I will also be posting a full size rendition (the image was drizzled 2x during processing) on Astrobin soon, but decided to give 'first light' to FocalWorld this time around.
As always, comments and critiques most welcome.
ML
Some details from Wikipedia:
NGC 2174 (also known as Monkey Head Nebula) is an H II[1] emission nebula located in the constellation Orion and is associated with the open star cluster NGC 2175.[1] It is thought to be located about 6,400 light-years away from Earth. The nebula may have formed through hierarchical collapse.
Equipment:
QHY268M Camera @ -10C and
Gain:56 Offset:25
Software Bisque MyT Mount
Stellarvue SVQ100 Astrograph Refractor, 580mm @ f/5.8
Antlia Pro Filters (3nm narrowband plus LRGB)
Askar FMA180 Guidescope/ASI290MM
Software:
Pixinsight Commercial Version 1.8
Lightroom CC
Photoshop CC
N.I.N.A. Control Software
Star XTerminator (Russell Croman)
Noise XTerminator (Russell Croman)
Light Frames:
Ha - 56 x 300 secs ( 4 hrs 40 mins)
OIII - 61 x 300 secs (5 hrs 05 mins)
SII - 60 x 300 secs (5 hrs)
Red: 30 x 15 secs (7 mins 30 secs)
Green: 30 x 15 secs (7 mins 30 secs)
Blue: 308 x 15 secs (7 mins 30 secs)
15 hrs 07 mins 30 secs total
Dark Frames:
10 x 15 secs (2.5 mins)
10 x 300 secs (50 mins)
Flat Frames:
10, each filter
Bias Frames:
60
Last edited:
