The Pacman Nebula, or NGC 281, is a pretty standard emission nebula located about 9,500 light years away in the constellation Cassiopeia. As astrophotography targets go, it's a really great narrowband target, with strong emissions across Ha, Oiii, and Sii, and lots of fun contrasty bits of structure and detail.
From a processing perspective, my goal was primarily to show off this structure, with a secondary goal to see if i could bring out some of the faint surrounding areas that you'll sometimes find in other images. For both of these objectives, integration time was critical, so I shot 16 hours of data each on both Ha and Oiii. Wind and clouds shaved this down somewhat, and I ended up with around ~26 hours of total usable data, which was still plenty. Once I had my masters, I did normal stretches on them but then created HDRMT versions, and blended them using partially opaque screen blending in the Blend script to create enhanced-detail versions. While these are what I wanted from a detail perspective, they were way too bright to do proper color combination on, so I had to dial them both back pretty hard prior to color combining with Pixelmath, then re-apply a brighter synthetic luminance once I had the palette I wanted (which took many iterations: thank you
@Michael & Jon Norman for listening to me vent and for being a second set of eyes). From there it was just basic contrast and curves adjustments.
This is one of my favorite narrowband targets, and while I think the colors and detail could still be better, I'm done fussing with it for now. Maybe next time I'll add some Sii to the party and see how that looks. As always, comments and criticisms welcome.
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