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Image of the day 09/08/2020

    Cygnus Loop | The Whole Ear - Lobe and All, Kevin Morefield
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    Cygnus Loop | The Whole Ear - Lobe and All

    Image of the day 09/08/2020

      Cygnus Loop | The Whole Ear - Lobe and All, Kevin Morefield
      Powered byPixInsight

      Cygnus Loop | The Whole Ear - Lobe and All

      Equipment

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      Acquisition details

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      Description

      I've been wanting to try capturing the entire Cygnus Loop and I thought I'd have it with the QHY600M and FSQ106. Nope - just didn't fit. So this is a two panel mosaic shot from the backyard over much of August.

      To me this looks like and ear with oriented 90 degrees counter-clockwise to how I have it here.

      My Chroma filters really did the trick because I live in the city, 3 miles from downtown Portland. Ha 5nm, OIII and SII 3nm works.

      I wasn't sure what color combo to use. This looks great in HOO, probably the closest to the broadband appearance narrowband ever gets. But the SII is very strong and I wanted to use it because it represents different structures than the Ha. The outer shell that makes the delicate wispy magentas here is completely missing in SII for example.

      So this is what I settled on:

      Luminance = HaOIII 50/50

      Red = Ha

      Green = OIII

      Blue = Ha+OIII-SII

      So the SII removes most of the red structures the Ha brings and that helps purify the blues by contrasting them better with the Red. In any case this gave me a lot of different colors to work with. Maybe too much for some? At least each of the different colors does represent a different combination of emission/reflection in that part of the object.

      Processing steps:

      1) Calibration with CCDStack

      2) Star Alignment to a Mosaic master in PI

      3) Image integration for channel masters in PI

      4) Color combination into panel masters in CCDStack (I like the normalization and NB combine)

      5) DBE on the panel masters in PI

      6) Stitch of the panel masters in APP

      7) Starless version created in Starnet++

      8) Noise Reduction on the starless in Topaz De-noise AI

      9) Color, curves, clean-up, and stars returned in Photoshop CC

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