After some of those rare clear nights at the beginning of this year, I decided to collect more data than usual for my images to improve their quality. Especially the narrow band images should be improved by the integration of a lot more subrames. At least in theory. I don't know what's wrong this year, but since the end of may, I rarely had really good clear nights. It took me 3 months to collect about 45 hours of data of the lobster claw nebula. That doesn't even include LRGB data, that I planned to improve my star colors. Some images were rejected. I got lucky last night and got at least the rest of the missing SII data. Now my patience is over and after a long time I wanted to show another image to the world. So I processed what I had and this is the result.

Like my image of SH2-129 (The flying squid), I have to upload the image without RGB stars. I will collect the missing data as soon as possible and try to improve the image with a following version. Meanwhile, I tried to work on my processing skills. I managed to change my workflow and tried to improve the sharpness and the bloating stars. I began by integrate the narrowband subs to the master SHO frames. After removing the stars, I did a dynamic background extraction and tried to handle the noise and sharbness of the nebula itself. After that I added the stars back in and tried some solor combinations. Although the SHO palette is not my favorite one anymore, I decided that the image looked best with this combination.

After that, I did some work on the colors of the image. I always struggled with this and I had to be really careful not to overprocess the result. There is definetly room to improve and I don't like the result colorwise, but I think I improved a bit at least on the other problems I saw in my images.

We'll see how things work in the near future. I really want to point to another object, but doing things right has a higher priority now. Meanwhile I try to handle the colors better and bring the stars to life.