IC 63 Cassiopeia's Ghost in RGB + Ha + SII, reshot with my new scope (Aaron Freimark)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Cassiopeia (Cas) · Contains: 27 gam Cas · IC 59 · IC 63 · LBN 620 · LBN 622 · LBN 623 · LBN 625 · Sh2-185 · The star Navi (γCas) · gamma Cas nebula

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IC 63 Cassiopeia's Ghost in RGB + Ha + SII, reshot with my new scope

Powered byPixInsight

IC 63 Cassiopeia's Ghost in RGB + Ha + SII, reshot with my new scope

I shot IC 63 “Cassiopeia’s Ghost” last year, and wanted to repeat with my new 120mm refractor. Wow, it was quite the challenge. It took 5 nights to gather the data I wanted. It’s also my first big project using NINA for acquisition. (Thanks for the encouragement @Tony Jerig !)

Preprocessing:

WeightedBatchProcessing
Subframe Selector using (number of) Stars for weight
Image Registration
Local Normalization
Image Integration
Drizzle Integration
Dynamic Crop

R/G/B:

Channel Combination
Statistics to determine that B is the brightest
LinearFit R & G to B
ChannelCombination
EZ Denoise
DynamicBackgroundExtraction to divide the background
EZ Soft Stretch to median 0.15
Morphological Transformation to reduce star sizes

Ha/SII:

EZ Denoise
StarXTerminator on the linear image (great results for Ha!)
EZ SoftStretch to median 0.2
CloneStamp to manually clean up around 800 StarXTerminator turds in SII (OK maybe not so great results)
Export Ha & SII to TIFF (16-bit)
Photoshop’s Content-Aware Fill to remove the huge blown-out star (cheating?)
Back to PixInsight
PixelMath to combine a narrowband mix:

R: 0.9*Ha + 0.1*SII
G: 0.4*Ha + 0.6*SII
B: 0.3*Ha + 0.7*SII

CurvesTransformation
UnsharpMask

Mask - this will darken or even remove stars in front of the nebula, which is very unscientific but pretty.

Extract CIE*L from NB
HistogramTransformation to create a severe version that works as a mask
Apply to RGB (stars)
PixelMath “0” onto the masked star image, which will blacken out the brightest parts of the nebula
Remove mask

Combination:

PixelMath: “1-((1-RGB)*(1-NB))” — I prefer this “multiply” effect over a simple “add”

Final
Original
B

B

Title: IC63 (Starless)

Uploaded: ...

Northeast Imagers
Mid-Hudson Astronomical Association (MHAA)

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5341177
PixInsight job	6L9W28F80OGNI9VZOSXU71H6Y8A5QKEP
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	00h59m56s.273
RA (top/left)	00h55m06s.662
RA (top/right)	00h57m26s.473
RA (bottom/right)	01h04m38s.287
RA (bottom/left)	01h02m32s.490

Dec (center)	+60°59′50″.79
Dec (top/left)	+61°25′41″.26
Dec (top/right)	+60°20′31″.30
Dec (bottom/right)	+60°33′22″.78
Dec (bottom/left)	+61°38′59″.99

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IC 63 Cassiopeia's Ghost in RGB + Ha + SII, reshot with my new scope

IC 63 Cassiopeia's Ghost in RGB + Ha + SII, reshot with my new scope

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B

Sky plot

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In these public groups

Image Index:

Contribution Index (beta):

IC 63 Cassiopeia's Ghost in RGB + Ha + SII, reshot with my new scope

IC 63 Cassiopeia's Ghost in RGB + Ha + SII, reshot with my new scope

Equipment

Acquisition details

Description

Comments

Revisions

B

Sky plot

Histogram

In these public groups

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