This nebula is quite an interesting target to capture for a large variety of reasons. It has a very interesting shockwave in the oxygen dense center. It was also originally classified as a planetary nebula but more recent evidence suggests that it might not be as the central stellar pair may not contain a star massive enough to form the nebula. The subframes themselves also do not show any hint of the nebula and only with integration does it get revealed.
Other interesting aspects are how this target is a terrible pain to capture from my backyard as it rises only a couple of degrees above a bush and over half the frames get occluded by a powerline. This led to some tricky calibrating, stacking, and processing. There was not as much integration as I would have liked for a target of this type however, we are near the end of the month and I need to submit it to get a TOTM patch
Overall, it's a very interesting target with beautiful blue core and red outer rims. My editing focused on trying to separate out the nebula from the background as much as possible even at the expense of some mottling. Like most of my other images so far, it would be fun to come back in the future when my skyline for it gets better.
Processing Steps:
- Calibrate in the Photometry Tab using ASTAP
- Move to PixInsight
- SubFrameSelector SNR > 1.48, FWHM < 4.5, Stars > 75, Eccentricity < 0.55 ( I could not be as picky as I would like as there are not that many subframes)
- WBPP Maximum settings no Drizzle, light frames only
- GradientCorrection
- SPCC, Photon Flux, IMX571, Narrowband Mode 7nm for each of the bandpasses
- BXT Default
- NXT 0.60 Denoise 0.15 Details
- SXT
- 6x GHS Tweaks to stretch the really really faint nebula
- NXT 0.4 Denoise 0.15 Details x2 (Trying to crush color noise and mottling)
- CurvesTransformation to suppress background
- SCNR to remove some green from nebula core
- Stars Arcsinh Stretch
- ScreenStars to combine the images together
- DynamicCrop rotate the image to the current framing and remove some leftover powerline background glow
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