NGC 1499 - California Nebula - SHO (NGC 1499 - California Nebula - SHO) (vsola)

NGC 1499 - California Nebula - SHO (NGC 1499 - California Nebula - SHO)

Revision title: NGC 1499 - California Nebula - SHO

A quick processing of the data I’ve gathered so far this month, mainly to try some of the new WBPP features in Pixinsight. This is about 4 hours of Ha, 2.5 of OIII, and almost 2 of SII.

I let WBPP handle all of the preprocessing using default parameters for normalization, integration etc. I was mainly curious about the new Auto Crop feature. Auto Crop took about 5 minutes to run on my PC. The advantage is supposed to be that it uses the astrometric solution, obtained earlier in the WBPP pipeline, to crop the masters. I’m not sure about the this versus manually doing dynamic crop.

Processing was pretty basic as I’m not done gathering data. After WBPP the had DBE applied along with a light touch of NoiseXTerminator. The Masters were combined in PixelMath. To save the astrometric data I made a clone of the Ha frame, used ConvertToRGB to change the colorspace and applied the PixelMath to the clone – overwriting the original file. This seemed to work because when I went to SPCC next I didn’t have to run the ImageSolver script. SPCC was used in narrowband mode with emphasis on stars selected.

The calibrated image had StarXTerminator applied. The starless image had a luminance mask applied while curves where used to boos the red and blue channels, bump up saturation, and adjust contrast.

PixelMath was used to add the stars back in and a stretched Ha image was used as a luminance file in LRGB. A final NXT was applied followed by star reduction and LocalHistogramEqualization.

Original
Final
C

C

Title: NGC 1499 - California Nebula - SHO

Description: Added more Ha, OIII, and SII data. Processed in Pixsight:
WBPP for stacking, registration, local normalization, and integration. The resulting masters had DBE applied and then the OIII and SII were linear fit to the Ha channel. The channels were combined using the standard SHO method and then using the Foraxx formulas.
The two images were then blended 70% Foraxx and 30% SHO. Linear noise reduction was performed with NoiseXterminator and then stretched using EZ soft stretch. StarXterminator was used to make a starless image. The starless image had each of the 3 color channels extracted using Split RGB channels.
The split channels were used as masks to make some curves adjustments and Local Histogram Equalization to the R and G channels. Slight curves applied to the stars prior to adding them back to the starless image.
A final application of Local Histogram Equalization was applied to the combined image.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	6832677
PixInsight job	08VAJMUC65Q2GQDXJV9JZ1CGHV4BCIOZ
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	04h01m38s.61
RA (top/left)	04h06m22s.70
RA (top/right)	04h04m52s.39
RA (bottom/right)	03h56m47s.55
RA (bottom/left)	03h58m30s.97

Dec (center)	+36°25′06″.1
Dec (top/left)	+35°26′33″.1
Dec (top/right)	+37°37′28″.3
Dec (bottom/right)	+37°22′56″.6
Dec (bottom/left)	+35°12′25″.8

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