Yaaaaaassssssss
Narrowband imaging is great because I can get results like this from my Bortle 7 backyard. This is with the Optolong 3nm narrowband filters I've been testing, and the QHY533M camera I've also been testing. (Both have been great!)
This is NGC 7822, an emission nebula and star-forming region in the constellation Cepheus. The cluster of young stars near the center is known as Berkeley 59. The nebula complex lies about 2,900 lightyears away. One of the stars in the complex is one of the hottest stars within 1 kpc (kiloparsec; aka, 3,261 lightyears) -- and O5V-type star with a surface temperature of a blazing 45,000 K (compared to the Sun's 5,700) and a luminosity 100,000 times greater than our Sun! It's one of the primary stars illuminating the nebula. It's not the bright one toward the left; rather, it's in the dust cloud to the right of the Berkeley 59 star cluster, and appears quite dim from here. It's an eclipsing binary star also known as V747 Cep.
The OIII channel turned out yucky and took some finessing, but the H-alpha channel was so clean it didn't need any denoising! SII looked pretty cool too. I decided to try processing this one without darks, since a lot of CMOS cameras now have such low dark current and read noise that you don't need darks anymore. I had a lot of hot pixels in the subframes, but because I dithered, they averaged out, and the stacked images were pretty low noise, and relinquished what little they had left to my MultiscaleLinearTransform denoise process. Also, my flats were messed up, so I didn't use them either (and thus had to clone-stamp out a few spots in the starless version of the image).
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