Heart of the Question - Ced 214 / Sh2-171 in SHO (Forax w RGB stars) (David Payne)

Heart of the Question - Ced 214 / Sh2-171 in SHO (Forax w RGB stars)

Revision title: Bill Blanshans Colour Normalization Version.

At the heart of NGC7822, the “Cosmic Question Mark” lies this bright, young star forming region, containing all of the feature of molecular cloud emissions being buffeted by UV radiation and stellar winds from the very stars that they created. One brighter area is being lit by a growing cluster of stars (Berkeley 59). Some of the stars within the cluster are very young and may not have been visible by our ancestor “Lucy”, 3.2 million years ago, even if she did have a telescope. Another patch of cloud on the right of the image, is being intensely excited by the star “BD+66 1673”. Wikipedia describes this “eclipting binary” star as being by the one of the hottest stars within 3000 light-years of us, with a temperature of 45,000K and a luminosity 100,000 fold greater than the sun. Of course, the nebulosity is replete with elephant trunks, pillars and nodules.
On the right edge of the image, the nebulosity fades to background. In contrast, on the left side of the image, the emission nebula is blotted out by foreground dark molecular cloud.
This image represents another foray into the Forax palette, which I am still learning the nuances of.
The nebulosity has been called the “Teddy Bear” nebula, but I think it looks more like a Welsh dragon.

Original
Final
B

B

Title: Bill Blanshans Colour Normalization Version.

Description: Just for interest sake, I have included a version (using the same Luminance), but colour determined by Bill Blanshan's colour normalization routine. I used to do a version of this straight up with GHS stretching or compressing individual colours, but it was rather clumsy - Bill's pixelmath routines are much easier to use. The drawback is of course, when you stretch a weaker channel (S and/or O) to match a very strong Ha, you either weaken that nice Ha information, or increase the noise substantially in S and/or O.
For this target, I like the intensity of the red and yellow in the Forax palette, so this was my final. However, some of the details associated with the O and S channel don't really come through as well as with the colour normalization method, and the image is left quite grey.
I think I am going to keep both methods in my toolbox.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	8048885
PixInsight job	55K6F085MGHMKJG4DARU1WAMPDNUYEIX
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	00h02m55s.297
RA (top/left)	23h57m56s.644
RA (top/right)	00h04m18s.350
RA (bottom/right)	00h07m52s.835
RA (bottom/left)	00h01m29s.504

Dec (center)	+67°16′33″.85
Dec (top/left)	+67°19′29″.19
Dec (top/right)	+66°48′44″.43
Dec (bottom/right)	+67°13′04″.41
Dec (bottom/left)	+67°44′20″.85

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