New year, new Pacman. This time with a new scope with more resolving power, an additional new filter, and new processing tools. I bought the ALP-T filter to be able to continue capturing data even under a full moon and to help eliminate gradients from LP, as these gradients and the moonlight impact the quality of the signal I could capture with the Tri-band filter. The new ALP-T Dual Narrowband Filter gave me incredible results with 14 hours of data in skies with nearly a full moon, and i took 3 hours of data with the Triband Filter before the moon came out, primarily for star color and to capture some of the blue/green that the ALP-T eliminates. The goal was to try to experiment with combining data from the two. It took me longer than I’d care to admit to figure out the best process for doing so, but the short version is that I generally followed the method from Paulyman Astro’s
video on OSC NB processing. I took the Foraxx result from that processing and used some pixelmath to combine the Foraxx image with the RGB image from the Triband data. I feel like this method gave me the best result in terms of enhancing the red and blue channels with the Ha and Oiii data from the ALP-T filter, while still keeping some of the blues and greens from the Triband filter (and of course, nicely sized and colored stars from the Triband as well!). I’m very happy with these new tools and I’m going to continue experimenting with processing in the future as I work on developing the best approach.
The Pacman Nebula, or NGC 281, is a star cluster of high-mass stars that is located about 6,500 light years from Earth.
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