Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Camelopardalis (Cam)
Sh2-204 Ha-LRGB, Pam Whitfield
Sh2-204 Ha-LRGB
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Sh2-204 Ha-LRGB

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Acquisition details

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Description

This one formed part of a test to troubleshoot some unpredictable and very irritating communication problems between the PC-stick and Universal Power Box. One evening of the test went reasonably well and the other didn't - however I think I'm making progress figuring out the problem which seems to be a complex interplay between bits of my particular setup.

I wanted a target in a particular part of the sky and chose Sh2-204 partly as it seems rather neglected and now I know why...... It is really faint! Seeing anything in the Ha at all needed some heavy-handed processing. I need an additional few solid nights of longer exposure Ha (requiring a well-behaved setup) to get something decent but that will have to wait until next winter until it's higher in the sky.

Seeing as I may or may not finish the Ha later this year I decided to get some LRGB to make up a image of sorts. It's somewhat limited due to intermittent disconnects between the PC-stick and UPB (that I eventually got fed up of) but after some work if you squint a bit you can see the faint arc from the Ha emission. There are two versions - one that is brightened and further tweaked to make it more obvious but both are heavily binned to reduce the noise in the weak Ha channel.

Ha: 19 x 600s 1x1

L: 9 x 300s 1x1

R,G: 5 x 180 2x2

B: 6 x 180 2x2

Comments

Revisions

  • Sh2-204 Ha-LRGB, Pam Whitfield
    Original
  • Sh2-204 Ha-LRGB, Pam Whitfield
    B
  • Final
    Sh2-204 Ha-LRGB, Pam Whitfield
    C

C

Description: Had a go to see if I could improve this one. Used drizzling to improve stars and some pretty aggressive use of Topaz Labs plugins both on the Ha and LRGB channels separately and also once combined. Denoise was effective enough that didn't need to rebin to combat the noise. Adjust was used to pull out the nebulosity without totally blowing out the stars. As a before and after exercise I'm quite pleased with it.

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Sky plot

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Sh2-204 Ha-LRGB, Pam Whitfield