NGC 6729 (Caldwell 68) is a reflection/emission nebula of the Corona Australis Molecular Cloud. It's an interesting region, with a variety of details.
This is actually the first proper broadband wide-field image I've captured in 18 months or so. All of my imaging has been with a dual-narrowband filter of late, but this target is a favorite, and was a good match for the field of view of the little Newt I've been modifying for imaging.
The data I captured was surprisingly clean, so processing was pretty straightforward. Background removal using GraXpert, a gentle deconvolution with BlurXTerminator, separation out into star and starless layers (with some masking to avoid messing with the glob), stretching, HDRMultiscaleTransform to tease out details from the brightest part of the nebula, some gentle sharpening and a pass through NoiseXTerminator. Then into Affinity for final colour tweaks, halo reduction, saturation and contrast adjustment and star/starless recombination.
I'd originally intended to capture 10-15 hours of data, but the first couple of sessions had sub-par seeing, which improved on the third night, so I kept going while the seeing was favourable. In the end, those initial nights were weighted to next to nothing (the last few nights were just so much better), but I trusted WBPP to deal with that!
I'm quite happy with the detail around the centre of the frame. It's quite a busy region.
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