The Liverpool Telescope is a 2 m f/10 RC scope on La Palma, Canary Islands, that gives away their subs for free once the astronomers are done with them. A great way of keeping up the processing skills for Swedes while waiting for dark nights to come back in September.
Of all the Liverpool Telescope data I have processed, this was possibly the best, and I think the final result shows some stunning detail in this nebula. In my humble opinion it is as good as, or maybe even better, than images I have seen from much larger scopes, including the 8.2 m Subaru Telescope (Hubble has only imaged a small detail of it).
For this image I used subs from five filters (60, 90 and 120 s exposures, average ca 90 s) taken during 2015-2016. After throwing out subs with eggy stars or poor focus (about 30% of my downloads - LT appears to save everything), I ended up with these:
sdss-r 38 x 90 s (red data)
Ha 15 x 90 s (33 % mixed with 67 % sdss-r for the red channel)
Bessell B 43 x 90 s (mainly blue data)
sdss-g 20 x 90 s (mainly blue data, 33 % mixed with Bessell-B for the blue channel)
Bessell V 33 x 90 s (used for the green channel)
So totally 149 x 90 s or 3.7 hours
The camera is a 6 x 6 cm (15 µm pixels) 18 Mpix CCD camera (2x2 bin) of the brand e2v, which I think is chilled to -100°C.
Stacking in Nebulosity 4 and processing in PS CS5. The data was so clean that I did not apply any noise reduction but I did some very mild sharpening (deconvolution) using the Focus Magic filter for PS.
Any comments and suggestions most welcome, and for once I also invite pixel peepers!
PS. In the last version I used APF-R processing to further enhance the image
See
http://www.cedic.at/apfr/
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