The Heart of the Soul nebula. This is the central rift in the middle of the Soul Nebula. This area has a lot of dust pillars highlighted by sulfur and hydrogen while the void they surround is filled with oxygen. Unfortunately, due to the full moon, I was not able to bring out enough oxygen in this first image but was able to make up for it a little in processing.
This is my very first mono image! This would be also considered my new rig's Astrobin first light. Mono is very interesting to me as the data actually feels a lot cleaner. However, I can't tell if that is just because my rig is F4 versus my Esprit is F7. There's also significant aberrations in this image that had to be dealt with as I was still testing around with this rig. The mono workflow during processing is not too bad in my opinion. It's just far more annoying in the stacking/calibrating phase as all 7 of the filters need to be handled every night separately. It's really easy to lose track of them. I also need to calibrate them separately since for the new rig I haul it in and out every night except weekends. This might cause some slight shifting of my optics and I dont want to take any changes when averaging flats beforehand. This is very unlike the Esprit where I know for a fact it's the same night after night.
Processing in general is very straightforward once you have the stacks. Nothing special was done here. However, the stars I had to stretch in a different manner than I usually do. I guess for a couple of images coming out soon, I'll have to experiment with the stars a bit. For my Esprit, I just spam Arcsinh slight stretches till I'm satisfied. For this, I used GHS and tried to manage the star cores well. This rig collects light so fast it actually blows out my star cores extremely quickly. I have to be careful with my subframe timing in the future.
Processing:
- For every night, calibrate each set of images with that night's flats. Darks and flat darks are pretaken stored library.
- Take all of the calibrated images and stack them in ASTAP
- RGB stars image turn on Light filters in ASTAP and obtain the stacked RGB image
- Bring to PixInsight
- Ha, Oiii, Sii
- DynamicCrop
- StarAlignment Ha, Sii, RGB Stars to Oiii
- BXT Correct Only
- GradientCorrection Auto Converge
- BXT Luminance Only (this sharpens my stars?)
- SXT
- GHS till satisfied (Ha needed some masking and Curves Transformations)
- NXT 0.60 Denoise and 0.15 Detail (2x for Oiii and 0x for Ha)
- RGB Stars
- From StarAlignment
- ImageSolver
- GradientCorrection Auto Converge
- BXT Correct Only
- SPCC Photon Flux Antlia V Series
- BXT Luminance Only
- SXT Generate Stars
- Final Image
- PixelMath
- R = Sii^~Sii + Ha * ~Sii
- G = 0.8 * Ha * ~Oiii + Oiii
- B = Oiii^~Oiii
- CurvesTransformation to tweak the shadows darker
- ScreenStars
- NXT 0.60 Denoise and 0.15 Detail
- Export
- Crop and Done!!
Thanks for reading and Clear Skies!!
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