I present to you a 4 panel mosaic of the small Magellanic cloud in narrowband with RGB stars. It is a fairly high resolution image ( around 64mp).
I was intending on going for an 8 panel mosaic originally, but the weather has not been playing along and I got to be very strategic with how much time I spend on a target this season if I want to image a few.
It is a beautiful yet quite difficult target to process and it took me quite some time to get it right and balance the emissions in these little burst of nebulosity that looks like opals.
I've combined a couple different processing techniques in this image. The first one was suggested to me by
@Jacob Heppell where I blended the SHO data by layering them in the order OHS in photoshop and colorising each layer to blue, green, and red respectively and blending using "screen" blend mode.
The second one is inspired
@Eric Coles (coles44) balanced histogram technique but I've modified it, using non destructive workflow using layers, with curves targeting only the Ha layer in the brightest part of the nebula to balance its luminosity against the Oiii and Sii emissions. That is how I got these opal colours.
Finally I shifted the green to a red hue to get closer to visual colours for the hydrogen emission and combined with RGB stars.
About the target:
The Small Magellanic Cloud or SMC may look like a nebulae but it is actually a dwarf galaxy near our very own Milky Way At a distance of about 200,000 light years the SMC, whilst a lot further away than most nebulae I normally shoot (between 5 to 7000 light year on average) is among one of our nearest neighbors and is one of the most distant objects visible to the naked eye. The SMC captured in this image has an average apparent diameter of about 8 moons and span over 4 degrees.
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