Veil Nebula is arguably one of the most beautiful objects in our sky. The bright filamentary structures hold many intricate details. The struggle with having all these details is where to draw the line between Ha and Oiii data. Both are loaded with fine structures, but when you blend them together, one will often hide the other. The key is maintaining a certain level of transparency which in itself becomes difficult very quickly. When I started this process, my interest was in the Oiii structure, but by the time I finished, I changed my perspective and decided to showcase the Ha structure instead. This unfortunately means I sacrificed some of the beautiful detail located in Pickering's Triangle. If I were to critique myself, that's the only thing I was disappointed with in this image. It's a very fine balance unfortunately. I don't believe you can have one over the other.
Here is the original Oiii layer of Pickering's Triangle.
I must also add, this project is the first light for my new Espirit 100. This scope is incredibly sharp and I don't believe I would have achieved this level of detail with my newtonian. It simply leaves it in the dust. In most projects, we're fighting to bring back the details to our raw images. In this project, I was fighting to maintain them during the process!
Hope you enjoy the image. It took quite a bit longer to process than normal. I am normally someone who processes my images starless, but in the case of this image, StarX and Starnet both wanted to take all the filamentary details with the stars. Instead I had to fully process the image with stars, then replace them with the RGB stars at the end.
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