An LRGB composition. L comes from the cooled mono CCD (with old TAK 67 flattener). RGB comes from the DSLR (with new TAK 645 flattener).
This is not a standard LRGB composition because of the difference in resolution between the two camera/flattener combinations. All color information comes from the DSLR, of course. For luminance, the luminance of stars completely come from the DSLR because they are sharper. The luminance of the central part of the galaxy has 50%/50% contributions from the CCD and DSLR. The luminance of the outer part of the galaxy and the faint dust clouds have 100% contribution from the CCD. The above can be cleanly done thanks to StarNet++.
In my previous image (
https://www.astrobin.com/wp8qtx/), I presented a close up of NGC 6946, and discussed about the foreground dust absorption from the Milky Way and the color of NGC 6946. This wide-field image shows the large-scale distribution of the foreground dust. It can be seen that NGC 6946 happens to locate in a "hole" of foreground dust. I spent extra steps (and compared with other people's pictures) to make sure that "hole" is not a processing artifact. If NGC 6946 is 1 degree away from its current position, it would suffer more from the foreground absorption and appears even redder.
Rev.B is an inverted starless grayscale image, to better see the complexity in the foreground dust.
Comments