California Nebula (NGC 1499)I decided to wheel out the NB3 again and take a shot at giving the California Nebula a close up - I spent far too long in Stellarium deciding how to frame this one! I really love how you can really see seperation in the channels with this target, especially how clear and distinct the structures are in the SII channel which I've found to be rather underwhelming elsewhere. The approximate field of view from Stellarium:
Took me a month to build up enough clear nights to be happy with this, I originally did a process with about half the final data and couldn't keep the noise down sufficently without destroying the fine detail. It's the curse of having so few clear nights I suppose, I have to take what I'm given, full moon or otherwise.
I decided to do this as a starless image first as I actually felt the star field in this area was detracting from the overall effect of the image, I might come back later and do a revision if I remember to grab some RGB stars in a future session.
ArtifactsYou'll probably have noticed a number of artefacts remaining in the starless image, originally I just assumed these were the remanents of the star removal process, however upon further inspection the vast majority of them appear to be background galaxies. I found it kind of interesting however how differently they appear in the different channels, I've included a snippet below of one of them that I found particularly neat.
I'm actually
very impressed with how good StarXterminator has become with some of the recent model updates.
Comments