A well defined ridge characterizes the famous bill of the Pelican nebula. Also known as IC 5070, this emission nebula lies close to the North American nebula, divided by an evident dark rift. Other dark clouds and twin jets emerging enrich this suggestive area that lies about 2000 light-years far from us
The image is the result of a total of 25 hours integration across multiple nights:- Ha: 24-25-26th August, 19-20-22-23th October 2021
- O3: 27-28-29th October 2021
- S2: 14-15th August 2021
This data was gathered across months... due to bad weather and fog I tried to point always something closed to the azimuth in order to have the best possible outcome. At some point I lost track of how much data i gathered and went beyond my normal exposure time. And this is also considering that i trashed 6-7 hours of very bad frames.
The image is fully processed in Pixinsight
PreparationAll started calibrating each light with dark (from my library) and with flats (taken each nights - flat & dark flats) with
ImageCalibrationSubframeSelector to weight all the lights.
I took the frame with lowest FWHM as reference to align all the channels with
StarAlignment and stack them with
Image IntegrationLinear Phase per channelAn initial round of
MureDenoise to start leads to some nice 'free' noise reduction
I extracted the background with
AutomaticBackgroundExtractorI use
LinearFit to balance the channels
Linear Phase channel combinedI use
PixelMath to obtain the HOO or the SHO versions
It's necessary to start preparing some mask: the star mask using the
Starnet process is a good place to start. After that a simple luminance extraction will give a B&W mask
I create some mask and apply some soft round of
MultiscaleLinearTransform for denoising, especially the background
I love the
PSF Image creator script by Hartmut V. Bornemann to obtain the PSF image for Deconvolution
I use one round of soft
Deconvolution, selecting the starnet starmask for deringing
Nonlinear phaseAt this point I linearize the image and work on the
CurveTransformations with some
ColorMask to obtain the colours I like the most. I try to do small modification each time
I use
Convolution and then
LRGBCombination to reduce chrominance noise
I crop the files to the format I like
You can see the editing process (and the trial and error of course) of how I reached the final HOO version on the recording of my live streaming on
Youtube .
I usually stream also on
Twitch .
I hope you like it
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