Image CaptureI put a majority of the imaging time on Oiii (>13 hours) because its so faint on this target and I have a cheaper 7nm Optolong filter for it. This was captured in bortle 6.5 skies. I experimented with 900 second/15min subs for this and captured 2 hours of data that way. I think I prefer my typical 440 second subs instead of 900 because guiding errors have higher risk to smear the stars and targets around in the final image. Essentially trading some sharpness for depth.
I imaged this over 3 nights but ended up leaving out the shorter 2 min sub data because I didn't want to normalize images lacking depth with the longer subs.
ProcessingI spent a good deal of time debating on HOO, Dreamplease HOO, or Forax_HOO variants. I ended up using a custom Hue modified version of HOO. I used all the pixinsight tools to produce this image (BlurX and NoiseX) although there was minimal noise thanks to the integration time and dithering. I used Starnet to isolate the nebulosity before doing some of my stretches, I also used HDRMultiscale to mitigate some of the highlights near the bright stars. It's cool to see the brighter Ha parts on the sides of the crescent nebula.
I wonder what this would've looked like if I had more expensive astrodon or chroma filters...
Here are the other versions I had played with. Which one do you like best? Leave a comment!
Option 2:
Option 3
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