Melotte 15, the heart of the Heart Nebula - IC 1805 - has always been a favorite part of the sky for me. Captured over many nights during the time I was working to get my Mother settled in an assisted living facility, this is perhaps the most integration time on one image that I have accomplished. Knowing that I had no time during the day to process, I just kept acquiring data and to my great delight, most of it was usable with only the occasional sub thrown out due to low transparency, noise, or wind buffeting. As I have finally served down to do some processing, I am very happy with the overall detail and low noise of the data. It was enhanced during processing with the "XTerminator" tools but the most significant tool used was the New Narrowband Normalization Process by Bill Blanshan and Mike Cranfield (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6se3b1ZotMc). What a great tool and it eliminates all those test runs with Pixelmath to get the colors in a Narrowband Image just where you want them. So, whether you like or dislike the color palette I ended up using for this image, check out their tool.
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