This is the first light with the newest version of my setup: Player One Ares-M Pro, Astronomik SHO 6nm + LRGB filters and Samyang 135mm f/2.0.
After half a night of doing tilt correction and setting up the filter offsets in N.I.N.A., I had around 3 hours of darkness left, of which the last one ended up being cloudy. The total integration is extremely short, just 2 hours and 10 minutes, but I was blown away by the amount of signal captured (it's probably a combination of the fast f-ratio, an extremely sensitive mono camera and the bright target I chose for the first light).
The main challenge in the processing of this image was enhancing all the Hα emissions without losing the blue color from the OIII, extremely noisy in the MasterLight, and the yellow hues from the SII, which mostly overlap with Hα.
Therefore I used a technique called
DynamicNarrowband with the following PixelMath formula (where S_clone and O_clone are stretched version of the respective emissions):
What came out from this dynamic combination was similar to an HSO palette, so I created two SHO versions where I enhanced the OIII in the first one and SII in the other one. They were then blended with the DynamicHSO using respectively masks for OIII and SII. Further editing was done and the resulting image features an orange Hα, a yellow SII and a magenta/purple OIII.
Since I didn't have time to shoot RGB for the stars, I made an HOO image that was calibrated with SPCC to have "accurate" star colors. The extracted stars were then combined with the starless DynamicHSO.
Hope you like the final image and clear skies!
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