Messier 8: 9-panel Mosaic, Alex Woronow
Messier 8: 9-panel Mosaic, Alex Woronow

Messier 8: 9-panel Mosaic

Messier 8: 9-panel Mosaic, Alex Woronow
Messier 8: 9-panel Mosaic, Alex Woronow

Messier 8: 9-panel Mosaic

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

Messier 8: 9-panel Mosaic

OTA: CDK24” f/6.5
Camera: Moravian C3-61000 Pro
Observatory: Heaven's Mirror, Chile

Exposures: 9 Panels of H,R,G,B with approximately 18 x 300-sec exposures of each per pannel. Total Exposure time used: approximately 54 hours.

Image Width: 1.3 degrees; 2x2 binned at capture and another 0.5 down-sampling for this posting.

Processing Tools:
1.    Commercial: PixInsight, Topaz Studio, Topaz Denoise, Topaz Gigapixel, Aurora HDR, Luminar Neo, 3DLUT Creator, PanaramaStudio 3Pro
2.    Pixinsight Addons: NoiseXTerminator, BlurXTerminator, StarXTerminator, Normalize Scale Gradient
3.    My Scripts: NB_Assistant, AC_Restar, Subframe Weighting Tool

Target Description:
Messier 8 is a well-known object suffering an almost endless litany of portraits. Its pink-to-red dominant color arises from the ionization and recombination of hydrogen atoms by UV radiation from massive stars hidden within the nebula.

The width of the nebula is about 140 light-years, and its height is about 60 ly. Since this image, as shown, spans 1200 pixels, each pixel spans about 1 trillion km! Fine detail in the image is anything but small.

Processing Description:
Total processing time, from image blinking and calibration to assembling the mosaic, processing the colors, and adding back the stars, took me about 10 hours. Then, I did another version and another, and …. In the process, I developed a better way to make a star mask and, by association, to replace the stars in a starless processed image, which exploits the alpha-compositing paradigm.

Alex Woronow

Comments

Revisions

  • Final
    Messier 8: 9-panel Mosaic, Alex Woronow
    Original
  • Messier 8: 9-panel Mosaic, Alex Woronow
    B

B

Description: With Stars

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Histogram

Messier 8: 9-panel Mosaic, Alex Woronow