Managed to get this one out before the end of Valentine’s here.
I encountered a couple of issues with this section of the sky that did not really crop up with other locations. Notably, my polar alignment would sometimes shift (I take the rig out then immediately start imaging after a polar alignment and don’t check it again) and be very noticeable as field rotation/oval stars.
Aside from this issue, the constant clouds, and the lower integration time, I think this project ended up great. I’m still working on processing so that it’s less noisy.
A Heart Nebula image needs a Soul Nebula companion so in the future I plan on either building a mosaic or getting a wider field view of the nebula pair. However, that will be after I figure out how the Soul Nebula actually looks like a soul.
Processing steps:
- Stack and clean in ASTAP
- Use GraXpert standalone to remove background
- Bring everything to Affinity
- Align the layers, brief stretch, and crop.
- Stretch the Quadband data and export
- Extract the stars with Starnet 2 CLI and bring them back to Affinity
- Use a JR Macro to split the OSC SiiHb and HaOiii images into RGB channels
- Assign channels with this scheme:
- From their respective channels, R -> Ha, R-> Sii, G -> Oiii, and G -> Hb
- Stretch each of the channels separately and export as a 16bit Tiff
- Run Starnet 2 CLI on each image to get their starless forms then bring the starless images back to Affinity
- Set Ha -> Luminance, Sii -> Red (add), Oiii -> Green (add), Hb -> Blue (add)
- Do some additional tweaks such as clarity filter on the Ha Luminance, Channel mix increase red and blue in those two channels, Noise reduction on color noise from the blue and green channels.
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