Soul Nebula in HaRGB (David McClain)

Soul Nebula in HaRGB

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

21 hrs total integration (16x900s R, 16x900s G, 16x900s B, and 18x1800s H-alpha). The palette is RGB with H-alpha serving as Luminance.

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Revision adds slight enhancement to wavelet layers with scale lengths between 8-32 pixels, with declining amount toward longer scale lengths. Same treatment as for the Heart Nebula.

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Revision does a better job of protecting the background before MMT enhancement. -- revision gets rid of the red halos on some of the stars.

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Revision is completely reworked from scratch, using better techniques for bringing out subtle structural detail, and avoiding chrominance noise. Fewer thick "black worms".

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er... do something about all the ringing artifacts around the stars...

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Redo (correctly!) from scratch. Also, M31 color cal indicates we need about 15% more Blue.

The little "floater" blob near the center of the image now stands out more clearly.

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Redo after learning some tricks from Vicent Peris at the Tucson PixInsight Workshop. Really great stuff!

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A few more lessons from the Tucson PI Workshop... this is subtle, and you'll have to look very close to see the improvements.

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Try again with deeper processing. Now we see the nebula fading into the background.

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Found a better (?) way of folding in Ha luminance. Sure are a lot of field stars in there... Not sure if I like this better or not. But it is certainly more realistic.

Presumably, the magenta / pink comes from H-beta mixed with H-alpha. The orange-red comes from H-alpha mixed with dust. And the orange around the periphery comes from light scattering from dust.

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Wow! While not as exciting at first glance, this one does much better at (A) preserving stars while minimizing stellar artifacts, (B) showing subtle gradations in the H-alpha intensity, (C) preserving sharp details in the clouds.

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Finally getting the hang of star deemphasis. I think this is the best one yet.

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Status	Basic failed
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	1082754
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
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