NGC 6543 - Cat's Eye Nebula (Scott A)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Draco (Dra) · Contains: Cat's Eye Nebula · IC 4677 · NGC 6543

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NGC 6543 - Cat's Eye Nebula

Revision title: Tighter crop to highlight core details

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NGC 6543 - Cat's Eye Nebula

Revision title: Tighter crop to highlight core details

This target was an interesting challenge. The central core of this nebula is extremely bright whereas the surrounding nebulosity is fairly dim. In order to capture this, I took images at 300s and at 30s and processed each of those stacks separately.

I processed the 300s stack for the surrounding nebula and stars as I would for any normal nebula.

For the core, I used the 30s stack and gently stretched it twice using a the ARCSIN stretch. Then I ran SPCC, BlurXterminator, and a gentle HDRMT process on it to give it just slightly more definition and bring out the central star.

Before combining the stacks, I first removed the central core of the 300s stack by masking off everything but the central core and using curves transformation. I then used PixelMath to add the two stacks together to create the final image.

I'm not sure how others have accomplished this but my efforts using the HDR Composition for this image and trying to stretch that HDR file to bring out the details in the central core and outer nebula seemed to be an exercise in futility.

Original
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Final
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Title: Slightly Cropped

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D

Title: Tighter crop to highlight core details

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	7889973
PixInsight job	LKIYI646O6GDNFOIGT0R3B7PFZYOX0EM
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	17h58m34s.464
RA (top/left)	17h57m10s.418
RA (top/right)	17h57m49s.274
RA (bottom/right)	17h59m56s.808
RA (bottom/left)	17h59m19s.873

Dec (center)	+66°37′57″.68
Dec (top/left)	+66°48′10″.33
Dec (top/right)	+66°25′32″.49
Dec (bottom/right)	+66°27′38″.40
Dec (bottom/left)	+66°50′18″.64

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NGC 6543 - Cat's Eye Nebula

Revision title: Tighter crop to highlight core details

NGC 6543 - Cat's Eye Nebula

Revision title: Tighter crop to highlight core details

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NGC 6543 - Cat's Eye Nebula

Revision title: Tighter crop to highlight core details

NGC 6543 - Cat's Eye Nebula

Revision title: Tighter crop to highlight core details

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Acquisition details

Description

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Revisions

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Sky plot

Histogram

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