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Heart Nebula in SOO/RGB+HaL, David McClain

Heart Nebula in SOO/RGB+HaL

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
Heart Nebula in SOO/RGB+HaL, David McClain

Heart Nebula in SOO/RGB+HaL

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

Raw frames courtesy of Deep Sky West Remote Observatory in New Mexico, USA. (deepskywest.com) Data obtained with FSQ 106EDXiii / QSI683wsg / Lodestar / Paramount MyT.

Approx 24 hrs total integration (16x1800s O-III, 16x1800s S-II, and 17x1800s H-alpha). The palette is SOO with R = S=II, G = O-III, and B = O-III, and with H-alpha serving as Luminance. This has become my preferred color mapping for SHO data.

This is really a bi-color image with H-alpha Luminance. The central region appears relatively starved of S-II and dominated by O-III. The choice here is what color to make O-III. By all rights it should be a greenish color at 501 nm. But we can stretch the color-space contrast, making it more blue.

At any rate, red areas are dominated by S-II, and blue/green areas by O-III. In truth, the whole nebula is hugely dominated by H-alpha and dust. S-II and O-III make up a much weaker component of the nebula. Everything out there is dominated by H-alpha. So for a change, let's not look directly at that.

Regions where both S-II and O-III are present become a whitish color, by analogy to tri-color image where all three component colors are present.

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Revision: Slightly enhance wavelet scale lengths 8-32 pixels, with declining weight as scale length increases. This brings out subtle details at smaller scale lengths in the image, highlighting the Bok globules and many dark cloud features around the border of the interior region.

This enhancement is not as harsh, in my opinion, as using local histogram equalization. It leaves the smooth blue regions intact without causing lumpy behavior there to quite the same degree, even when compared to light amounts of local histogram equalization.

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Revision backs up and produces detail less harsh, less chrominance noise. A bit less deep blue.

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Touch up using some insights gleaned from Vicent Peris at the Tucson PixInsight Workshop.

Comments

Revisions

  • Heart Nebula in SOO/RGB+HaL, David McClain
    Original
  • Heart Nebula in SOO/RGB+HaL, David McClain
    B
  • Heart Nebula in SOO/RGB+HaL, David McClain
    C
  • Heart Nebula in SOO/RGB+HaL, David McClain
    D
  • Final
    Heart Nebula in SOO/RGB+HaL, David McClain
    E

Histogram

Heart Nebula in SOO/RGB+HaL, David McClain