Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Cassiopeia (Cas)  ·  Contains:  IC 1848  ·  IC 1871
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Soul Nebula SH2-199, Mike Soulby
Soul Nebula SH2-199
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Soul Nebula SH2-199

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
Soul Nebula SH2-199, Mike Soulby
Soul Nebula SH2-199
Powered byPixInsight

Soul Nebula SH2-199

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

Two nights on the Soul Nebula with my WO ZS 73. Taken using the LeNhance clip filter with a modified DSLR. I am pleased with my progress and what you can achieve with modest equipment and some patience during processing. I would like to add some RGB star data to this to get some more natural colours in the stars which the LeNhance takes away.

Processed in Pixinsight - workflow went something like this, but there was probably some back and forth.

1. Dynamic Crop - take in the edges to remove stacking artefacts
2. RGB Channel extraction then Linear Fit to remove colour cast then LRGBCombination
3. Dynamic Background Neutralisation (remove vignetting and light pollution gradients) - run twice - 1st iteration division, then on 2nd iteration use Subtract.
4. Colour Calibration - Plate-solve the image first (SCRIPT>Image Analysis>ImageSolver- ensure FITS header is copied to master image first. Change focal length/pixel resolution due to drizzled image) then I used Spectrophotometric colour calibration.
5. I used BlurXterminator for 'deconvolution' - using modest settings that were dialled down a fair bit and checking carefully against the image before and after to ensure there were no magically created stars or artefacts, also it is easy to over-do this step and things can start to look a bit too crispy and you can create wiggly worms in the background (same when you overdo the traditional decon process).
6. Noise Reduction - I tried EZ De-noise and compared it against NoiseXTerminator. EZDenoise gave good results but NoiseXTerminator was almost always better and much quicker.
7. Initial stretch to get the stars about right (using LeNhance so my stars were never going to be amazing), quite a gentle stretch applied at this point using Histogram transformation, just enough to get the stars right(ish).
8. Star removal using StarXterminator and creating a stars only image/mask
9. Split to RGB channels for the starless image and then combined the Blue and Green in pixelmath to create an OIII image, then used the red for Ha
10. Stretched both the OIII and Ha starless images. This is probably the most fiddly step especially as there are so many options in PI to choose from to stretch an image. I found the automatic STF dropped into the Histogram transformation was too aggressive and didn't like the results. I then played around with ArcSinhStretch combined with histogram transformation to help bring the blacks back a bit, which gave ok results (this is what I used in Photoshop before I had PI). Then I tried masked stretch but it wasn't until I tried the GeneraliseHyberbolicStretch script that I felt like I was getting somewhere so this is what I used for my main stretching process.
11. Recombined Ha and OIII in pixel math, and tried a few combinations until I was happy with the colours.
12. Further gentle Curves Transformation to work on the starless image and to bring out some of the OIII hues. Masking the OIII channel highlights onto the RGB image and playing with the Curves Transformation to do this. I am sure there are different ways but seemed to work quite well to pull out some of the OII hues. A poor mask gives poor results here so spent some time on generating the mask.
13. Sharpening - unsharp mask - has to reduce from the defaults quite a bit as again this is easy to overdo.
14. Dark Structure enhance script - I like this one its quick and easy!
15. Worked on my stars only image, adjusting curves a bit and saturation to pull out what colour is left after using the LeNhance filter.
16. Added stars back in using Pixelmath with a screen function
17. Final tweaks, curves, saturation, background, etc
18. ACDNR to tidy up a bit.
19. Resampled to a reasonably sized image (originally drizzled)
20. Brought into Photoshop and did some further final tweaks in camera RAW
21. Finally post on Astrobin after 9 months!

Comments

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Soul Nebula SH2-199, Mike Soulby