Pacman Nebula Sh2-184, NGC281, LBN 616, SHO with Foraxx Palette (Alastairmk)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Cassiopeia (Cas) · Contains: IC 1590 · NGC 281

Pacman Nebula Sh2-184, NGC281, LBN 616, SHO with Foraxx Palette, Alastairmk

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Pacman Nebula Sh2-184, NGC281, LBN 616, SHO with Foraxx Palette

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Pacman Nebula Sh2-184, NGC281, LBN 616, SHO with Foraxx Palette

While the Pacman nebula -- which looks more like a star gobbling galactic goldfish in this image -- is a popular image, I have always found it a challenge to process. The Ha channel is very bright, contains most of the fine detail, and tends to swamp SII and OIII. Perhaps this problem is compounded with a 5nm Ha Astrodome filter and 3nm Chromas for the other channels. In any case, I found it difficult to get an image that either wasn't too green or a washed out sepia. Having had some success on another difficult project I tried reprocessing using the Foraxx palette in SHO. This requires each channel to be stretched and doing this with GHS to capture the detail involved some work. Getting a good quality Foraxx image required a lot of attention to stretching each channel just right. While Foraxx produced nice colors, a lot of fine detail was lost compared to conventional processing, swamped by the amplification of the SII and OIII channels done by Foraxx. I fixed this problem by doing a conventional RGB combination of each channel and focusing on only the luminance/brghtness while stretching in GHS. Extracting the luminance channel from this image and combining it with the Foraxx RGB image produced the image you see.

Subframes were acquired from backyard observatory over 10 nights in November 2023, with an Explore Scientific 127mm CF apochromatic refractor at f6. Camera ZWO ASI1600MM-C gain 0 cooled to -20C. Main n nebula was processed using a starless masters for each channel. RGB stars were process in parallel and calibrated with SpectroPhotometricColorCalibration before being combined with the SHO starless image at the end. Total integration was 31 hours comprising:
Ha 82x480s
OIII 71x480s
SII 74x480s
R 25x30s
G. 40x30s
B. 28x30s

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Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	9706935
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
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Pacman Nebula Sh2-184, NGC281, LBN 616, SHO with Foraxx Palette

Pacman Nebula Sh2-184, NGC281, LBN 616, SHO with Foraxx Palette

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Pacman Nebula Sh2-184, NGC281, LBN 616, SHO with Foraxx Palette

Pacman Nebula Sh2-184, NGC281, LBN 616, SHO with Foraxx Palette

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