My first completed images after moving to a darker sky location and getting my telescope setup at the new location. This target required a lot of integration time to bring the noise down in the Ha across the entire image as well as to bring out the details of the OIII ring around WR134, including the fainter part of the structure. The star cluster in the upper left portion of the image stuck out to me immediately when the images started coming in and realized later on that it was NGC 6871.
Also of interest when zooming in is the numerous smaller dark nebula structures around the image, focused on the left side near NGC 6871. When processing this image, the Ha and OIII images were processed in the following order:
- NoiseXterminator (20% for Ha, 40% for OIII)
- BlurXterminator (default settings, had very limited impact for this target)
- StarXterminator, with stars completely removed from image
- Masked stretch based on preview in upper right most corner of the image which is the only area of the image with something close to actual background. Most of the rest of the image has faint OIII or Ha so I elected to not use any background extraction.
- GHS on the central OIII ring with the inflection point set between the darker areas in the middle of the ring and the fainter details wanting to bring out. Also used a relatively restrictive upper bound to prevent overstretching the brighter portion of the OIII ring.
- Channel combination of HOO image and subsequent curves adjustments
For the RGB stars, each stack was integrated and then combined with channel combination. Image was solved and SPCC used to calibrate the star colors. StarXterminator used to generate stars only image. This stars only image was then stretched using STF and Histogram transformation.
To merge the two images, I created an HOO + RGB image using pixel math (e.g., max(HOO, stars only)). Then I used the StarReduction script with the "Stars" method with a moderate intensity and two iterations to create the new HOO image with RGB stars. Then finished off with a few curves adjustments to shift the blue and red hues, the dark structure enhance script to bring out the smaller dark nebula structures, and a final pass of the NoiseXterminator script with a 40% intensity. Thanks for looking
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