Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Cepheus (Cep)
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Elephant Trunk, Walter Torres
Elephant Trunk
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Elephant Trunk

Revision title: Final

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
Elephant Trunk, Walter Torres
Elephant Trunk
Powered byPixInsight

Elephant Trunk

Revision title: Final

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

I completed a two panel mosaic on the elephant trunk nebula with my "wide field" scope last month and was amazed at the amount of dust and detail in the trunk itself.  So I decided to take a closer look with my AT130.  I had dismantled this rig last month to use the nitecrawler on my other telescope and when I assembled it back for this image I must've gotten something wrong and introduced some tilt (as can be seen in the corner stars).  I also had to stop imaging from 20min before through 20min after the meridian to prevent the scope from running into the mount legs (how unfortunate).  But in spite of the setbacks I'm thrilled with this target and look forward to adding another night of integration to really solidify the details.

For this image I accumulated 56 X 300sec SHO subs (Ha*30, Sii*13, Oiii*13), one after the other for consistency and dithered for noise management over three nights.
Stacked in DeepSkyStacker and calibrated with darks, flats, and dark flats.

PixInsight workflow:
Cropped all channels about 100 pixels on each side
EZ Soft Stretch on all channels
Combined SHO with PixelMath - Hubble Pallet
Combined SHO with PixelMath - Foraxx Pallet
Combined 50% Hubble + 50% Foraxx with PixelMath for final image
        SCNR Green 50%
Ha - Local Histogram Equalization
        Multiscale Median Transform
        Dark Structure Enhance
        Curves Transformation
        EZ Star Reduction     
        NoiseXTerminator
Applied Ha as Luminance to final image

Photoshop workflow:
Camera Raw Filter adjustments
     Vibrance
     Saturation
     Color Mixer
           Hue adjustments
           Saturation adjustments
           Luminance adjustments
Resampled to 50% and exported

Edit: Added an extra 8.5hrs of data between July 11 and July 13.  These were taken from my home, a Bortle 7 zone and fuller moon instead of the dark site like the initial set.  So it looks like I lost a little bit of contrast but the extra time sure helped smooth everything out, including the stars.

Comments

Revisions

  • Elephant Trunk, Walter Torres
    Original
  • Final
    Elephant Trunk, Walter Torres
    C

C

Title: Final

Description: Added an additional 8.5hrs of data.
Ha 65*300sec
Oiii 19*300sec
Sii 19*300sec

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Elephant Trunk, Walter Torres

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