Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Cassiopeia (Cas)  ·  Contains:  IC 1795  ·  IC 1805  ·  IC 1831  ·  IC 1848  ·  IC 1871  ·  NGC 1027  ·  NGC 896
Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
The Heart & Soul, Brent Newton
Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
The Heart & Soul, Brent Newton

Equipment

Loading...

Acquisition details

Loading...

Description

What a Project! This data set was a wonderful challenge, both on the side of data acquisition as well as post-processing. I had never attempted combinations of narrowband into color images, and this was compounded by the fact that I had also never made a mosaic. In the end, this image required 2, one mosaic for color, and then another to match that in narrowband Hydrogen-Alpha! I am certain I will return to this image next year, most likely with an OIII filter. Both of these nebula are located near Cassiopeia at a distance of ~7,500LY. I was happy to also find a small planetary WeBo-1 located just to the left of the Heart (near the "top" as it is typically drawn). In H-alpha it is difficult to see but since i was looking for it I did manage to find a faint ellipse surrounding a star. Hopefully that aforementioned OIII filter will help me out with it for next year.

Processing as stated was complicated, but also made me finally comfortable in use of PixInsight.

Broadband Panels, Initial Processing:
- (Stacking) Batch Prep Processing, Subframe Selector, Star Align, Local Normalization, Image Integration, Drizzle Integration
- Image cloned, ABE ran several times, then I used this background-extracted image to place DBE sample points. This saved DBE process was then applied to the original image, ensuring DBE points would not be placed on background nebula as much as possible
- Extracted Luminance for separate processing

Color Processing:
- PhotometricColorCalibration (after uploading each panel to Astrometry)
- SCNR to remove Green casting
- TGV & MMT Noise Reduction using theJohn Rista method (Chrominance)
- MaskedStretch using Aggregated background Previews

Narrowband & Luminance Processing:
- Deconvolution using DynamicPSF and StarMask
- TGV & MMT Noise Reduction using Rista method (Luminance)
- Standard STF Stretch using HistogramTransformation
Combining L + RGB, further Processing
- LRGB Combination used to recombine the Luminance and Color images
- ACDNR (Rista method)

Mosaic Combination:
- Roughly followed THIS tutorial
- Rough mosaic made with StarAlign, then each panel was matched to the rough mosaic

Broadband Mosaic Processing:
- Curves to bring out nebula slightly, increase saturation
- Histogram adjustments to keep background green down

Narrowband Mosaic Processing:
- Narrowband Image aligned to Broadband using StarAlign
- Curves adjustments for contrast
- MMT Noise Reduction to smooth out the background
- Unsharp Mask
- HDRMultiscaleTransform for further sharpening
- MorphologicalTransformation for Star Reduction using a Star Mask

Combining Narrowband into the Color Image:
- Both Mosaic images loaded into Photoshop CS6
- Narrowband blended into color image as Luminosity
- Increased color saturation, blended as Color
- A few tweaks to background color using Curves
- Unsharp Mask and LocalContrastEnhancement (Carboni’s Tools) for slight sharpening of nebula features

Comments

Revisions

  • The Heart & Soul, Brent Newton
    Original
  • Final
    The Heart & Soul, Brent Newton
    B
  • The Heart & Soul, Brent Newton
    C

B

Description: 2023 Reprocess

Uploaded: ...

C

Description: Annotated

Uploaded: ...

Sky plot

Sky plot

Histogram

The Heart & Soul, Brent Newton

In these public groups

Central USA

In these collections

Astromod T3i + AT72ED
DSO