This iconic target has something special for small refractors like RedCat 51. It is very small, so how much you can reveal? Here is the entire field of view to give you an idea:
Turns out, you can reveal quite a lot. Its unique structure is sharp enough to be resolved with good processing techniques, even with such small telescopes. And I wanted to challenge this idea. Initially started with this field of view and then cropped it to create
this image of WR134. But then, I moved the frame down a bit and took more Oiii for also other targets that I'm still working on. Here is the close-up result:
How close I could get is amazing to see. And sharper results are possible too, I just aesthetically prefer a smoother result. If you haven't seen yet,
@Timothy Martin 's comparison showed how different scopes can achieve similar results on this target. I highly recommend checking it out
here. But as I person who tried similar approaches on differnt targets, I can tell that the choice of target is important here. That's what makes Crescent Nebula so unique --and some others with sharp details.
While shooting this region, my goal was to reveal more Oii details. Cause I believe there might be more. The faint bottom part is already appearing in many images but too faint and seems like disintegrated. I wonder if this can be completed to a closed loop (red curves below). Also I notice some faint structures around it too (blue curves). However, I do not think these are related to Crescent itself, but rather might be independent background/foreground structures. It was the bottom blue curve that took my attention, because it aligns with the Crescent pretty much. Maybe just a coincidence, but took my attention anyway.
This was a nice project to work on and such an amazing result for my tiny scope. There will be more images from this region, but they require a special treatment. And as always, I want to thank my dear friend
@Emre Can Alagöz for his valuable comments on processing this target. With him I was able to figure out a few tricks here.
*For the zoom-in mouse hover action, I needed to downsize the image as it requires them to be in same resolution. So I added another revision for the full resolution version of the same field.
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