This has been about a month long capturing all the data I could. With the smoke in the air from the Canadian wildfires and clouds ruining many nights of data collection. I had to discard over 4hrs of data for various reasons. That said, I finally got something I'm happy with. When I did get clear nights for data collection I had very good seeing for my location. When my image was integrated I had FWHM numbers that put my seeing in the 2.4" range. I know many of you have much better seeing then that but for me here in Michigan I'm extremely happy to have these very good nights. Most nights we are lucky to have 3 - 3.5" seeing.
I used my ALP-T 5nm dual band filter. It just continues to impress me the more I use it. I do have to got out to 600 second subs which can be a pain at times but well worth the effort to do so. I used my L-Pro to capture the RGB star colors and then used the NB luminance from the NB stars to give a much better blend into the starless image. I was also impressed at the Ha data and used that to add back to the starless image to help pull out more detail in the crescent and it also helped to pull out more structure in the surrounding areas.
I was very careful not to over sharpen this however I think I could have done just a tad bit more and have been still ok. My plan is to do a cropped in version of just the nebula and OIII region and I'll play with the extra sharpening then.
I used APP to extract the HA and OIII data and used the HOO-1 Algorithm to create the image. I then adjusted the 2 OIII channels just a bit to pull more of the outer shell of the OIII channel. I was very surprised at how much OIII lies beyond the main nebula itself. It was fun to see so much there but I had to be carful not to over do that channel. I think I have a happy medium here that I'm happy with.
A while back I used my C10 to shoot this as well. I've never combined 2 different data sets so I may give that a try just to see how it would come out. It would add about another 5+ hours of data, but at a lower resolution. Here is that image:
https://www.astrobin.com/zom72m/B/?nc=&nce=Thanks for looking!
Dale
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