OU4-Squid nebula (Boštjan Zagradišnik)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Cepheus (Cep) · Contains: HD201344 · HD201429 · HD202214 · HD202380 · HD239582 · HD239605 · HD239618 · HD239626 · LBN 445 · LBN 449 · LBN 453 · Sh2-129

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OU4-Squid nebula

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OU4-Squid nebula

It took some time to process this image. The biggest issue was isolating the Oiii region from Ha. This is where I realized that a color camera is really not the best option to image this kind of target using a dual or triband filter mainly because the bayer matrix on the sensor is not perfect. Green pixels not only collect Oiii signal but Ha as well, not much, like 10% but it's still there. It would be wiser to use a Oiii filter and Ha filter separately and then extract the best channel from both filters and combine them into HOO for example.

I had an idea how to create a good mask, to isolate Oiii. I searched for OU4 nebula images on google and selected the one that roughly matches my image scale and the Oiii region needs to be high SNR and have a strong contrast from the background. Found an image then downloaded it. Used DynamicAlignment on my main image. Extracted Oiii with a colormask script, refined the mask with clone stamp and convolution to soften it a little. The mask almost perfectly matched my data and was able to increase the Oiii signal to make it more visible without producing artifacts.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	6532119
PixInsight job	GJW3B3WYV36MOOBP8XVY8SETFFH00JLL
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	21h12m08s.95
RA (top/left)	21h11m44s.70
RA (top/right)	21h21m26s.71
RA (bottom/right)	21h12m35s.79
RA (bottom/left)	21h03m05s.78

Dec (center)	+59°48′38″.4
Dec (top/left)	+58°35′09″.3
Dec (top/right)	+60°12′39″.7
Dec (bottom/right)	+61°02′17″.7
Dec (bottom/left)	+59°22′20″.3

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OU4-Squid nebula

OU4-Squid nebula

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OU4-Squid nebula

OU4-Squid nebula

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