The Dumbbell Nebula (Pistachio_Enjoyer)

The Dumbbell Nebula

After almost 3 months of no new images, I wanted to share one that I had been sitting on for months. I would have shared this one earlier, but I was waiting for all my parts to come for my new PC that I now use, which makes processing in Pixinsight painless. The Dumbbell Nebula is the definitive example of a PN and is widely known amongst astrophotographers.

The image as usual is not a HOO + RGB stars combination, but one where the Ha and OIII channels are mapped to their respective colors. I have a personal preference for true color, while the bicolor nature of HOO gives images a flat appearance in my opinion. The ratios I use for Ha are 80% red and 20% blue, while I use 43% green and 57% blue for OIII. As for luminance, 80% Ha and 71% OIII are added respectively prior to LRGB combination. This produces an interesting result where some of the globules in the core are not pure magenta, but a more salmon color, pointing to the presence of other gases in that region.

I did not use continuum subtraction for this image, as I find that useful only for adding nebula structure to galaxy images, where not doing so would impact the broadband data. For nebula images, I would think that it doesn't cause too much of a difference, but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. When stretching the image, I wanted to make sure to not push too hard and still ensure that I could get the faint outer regions of the nebula to sufficiently appear. If I wanted those regions to appear more brightly, more data would have been needed, especially in Ha. This is an object that I would like to revisit once I have higher quality filters that I can use as opposed to the ZWO filters I have for now. They have served me well, but soon, it will be time for an upgrade.

Any feedback for improvements is appreciated, and of course, clear skies to all.

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Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	9348758
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
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The Dumbbell Nebula

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