Melotte 15 The Heart of the Heart (Roy Hagen)

Melotte 15 The Heart of the Heart

Revision title: Increased contrast and saturation

Melotte 15The Heart of the Heart nebula, Melotte 15 aka Collinder 26, a cluster of stars that some of them are much larger than our sun surrounds by the Hear nebula in the constellation Cassiopeia some 7500 lightyears away from us.

So, why a starless version of a open clusters of stars as a mouseover effect?
A starless open cluster, must be the joke of the year😂😂
The open cluster of stars is absolutely a beautiful target, but my intension was most of all to get a decent take on the fantastic structures of gas and dust, the "tree of life" like structures of nebulosity stretching deep into the center of the cluster.
I have visited the Heart nebula a few times before, and tried to process the cluster and the nebulosity within but never ended up satisfied with the result.

To enhance the blue color channel in the image I used the GHS tool to normalize the color channels.
The Narrowband Normalization tool does the job, but I cant get the red color quite right, so this is where the GHS shines.

The f.o.v. on this telescope is much wider than the cluster, so the image is around 50% cropped to focus only on the cluster and the closest nebulosity.
Changing weather, and uncertain weather forecasts these days, so no imaging could actually be planned, but I got lucky a few nights and got nice, clear skies when the weather forecast was negative.
Hope you like the image

Original
B
C
Final
D

B

Title: Starless version

Uploaded: ...

C

Title: Color adjust

Uploaded: ...

D

Title: Increased contrast and saturation

Uploaded: ...

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
PixInsight job	RPAN78Q21CA9UGTE3AB2VEY3RL3WOKGO
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	02h33m50s.673
RA (top/left)	02h29m54s.191
RA (top/right)	02h29m21s.423
RA (bottom/right)	02h37m40s.312
RA (bottom/left)	02h38m25s.486

Dec (center)	+61°27′51″.78
Dec (top/left)	+61°54′03″.00
Dec (top/right)	+61°07′11″.51
Dec (bottom/right)	+61°01′16″.28
Dec (bottom/left)	+61°47′57″.16

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