Well, it wasn't more than a day that my original Eskimo Nebula was hot off the presses and I was quite pleased and content with the results. It was a fun quick resolution test and a quick hit target that made some very nice results. I moved on and I was like this is great!
Sure enough, the next day Adam Block came out with this masterpiece...
https://www.adambloc...m/ngc-2392.html My first thought was gaah!!!! I'll never be able to do something like that... My next thought was WOW.... It is awesome that somebody out there is creating stuff like this for us to aspire to. Sure enough, I couldn't let my image be. I didn't expect my little almost 6" refractor (which is really quite big) in the Pittsburgh LP and sky muck to compete with Adam's results with a 32" on top of a pitch black pristine mountain, but I thought surely there is more in there for me to get!
So, I continued my experimentation with fun little planetary nebula imaging and banged away at 2 minute subs for 6 straight nights in Ha and OIII to try desperately to get a little more detail and a little more information. In all, I collected another 120 subs of Ha and 120 subs of OIII. I believe I kept about 40 of each of those channels and weighted very heavily towards a small fwhm. I reprocessed a bicolor version, made a synthetic lum version with the nb channels, and slopped the original image together with the new two images to get the final results here. I'm honestly pretty pleased with the outcome. It is clearly pushing the limits of true data, but all of the examples I'm seeing online from huge scopes show the same details and structure, so I'm quite confident it is real. This PN imaging and experimenting is a real treat and is providing some very interesting and fun challenges that are completely different than what I've played with before.
As always, C&C's are most appreciated and thanks for looking!!
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