The Lion's Head - LDN 1161 (Jonathan Piques)

The Lion's Head - LDN 1161

This is the head of the Lion Nebula (Sharpless 132) in Cepheus, also known as LDN 1161. I've imaged the Lion Nebula before, but not a close up of just the head, which has a lot of really interesting detail, particularly in Ha.

I continue to try out new processing techniques to try and find new / different / more striking color palettes. For this, I tried a couple of different Pixelmath combinations with synthetic green channels, and both had their merits: one had some very lovely blues, and the other had the gold I was shooting for near the center. Rather than pick one versus the other, I used Pixelmath's version of screen blending (~(~IMG1*~IMG2)) to see if I could get the best of both worlds, and while it wasn't perfect, it definitely was an improvement over either image alone.

I continued to use Adam Block's star emphasis technique, which I'm finding is becoming a regular part of my workflow. What I need to pay close attention to are the large stars, that they don't get touched by the process.

I'm still not 100% happy with this: it's not quite as clean as I would like, and as noise-free as the Ha and Oiii masters suggest. Somewhere through all the editing it's gotten a little overcooked, when you zoom in to the pixel level, and I need to be mindful of that in either subsequent revisions and/or in future images. It's odd because normally you find that in over-sharpened images, but this has had little to no sharpening applied beyond initial deconvolution, which was subtle. Anyway! I AM happy with the color palette, and the past few images have really helped me get that where I want it. I'll work on not creating noise / artifacts in subsequent images.

Original
Final
B

B

Description: Mild tweaks to the color palette for a more neutral background.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	3914729
PixInsight job	SI9OPQCX95T6D4EQRLQ2A2O7XFZJZHZA
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	22h19m45s.765
RA (top/left)	22h18m02s.507
RA (top/right)	22h16m41s.948
RA (bottom/right)	22h21m26s.394
RA (bottom/left)	22h22m52s.761

Dec (center)	+56°07′44″.58
Dec (top/left)	+56°37′20″.76
Dec (top/right)	+55°47′13″.40
Dec (bottom/right)	+55°38′01″.30
Dec (bottom/left)	+56°27′57″.80

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