Lobster Bubble (Andrew Burwell)

Lobster Bubble

Link: https://www.macobservatory.com

I shot this image over two nights from my back yard which is in a bortle 7/8 zone south of Houston, Texas.

Thanks to modern tools like StarXterminator and NoiseXterminator, I'm able to push the data quite far often revealing very faint nebulosity despite my light polluted skies.

I typically process the stars separate from the nebula. I'll do a moderate masked stretch with default values on a star image that I generate using PixelMath with the following formula (Ha, SII*.5 + OIII*.5, OIII) into Red, Green, and Blue channels. I'll usually increase saturation, and hit the stars with a pass of SCNR set to about 60% to remove any residual green cast.

When I process the nebula, I perform NoiseXterminator and StarXterminator in the linear state, and use channel combination to combine SII, HA, and OIII into R, G, and B channels. I stretch using a ScreenTransferFunction with channels unlocked. Apply those settings to the HistogramTransformation. This typically nets me quite an extreme stretch without losing any detail, but enhancing barely visible nebulosity. The overall image at this point is probably stretched a little too far, and is void of any truly black areas.

I'll take both my stretched nebula and stars into Photoshop at this point for recombination. I often apply curves to the nebula only to return the black point of the darkest areas of the image back to black. From there, I use selective color to edit greens if I feel they're too dominant and begin to adjust yellows, reds, and blues selectively as well to taste.

In addition to these edits, I might also apply selective local contrast to areas of the nebulosity if I feel those areas lack contrast or detail. I don't usually apply much sharpening, and rely on culling images (prior to integration) with the highest FWHM or eccentricity to keep detail visible.

Texas Astronomy

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Backyard
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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	6310298
PixInsight job	L65EF17ICI55NZHYF7WHN2TMNY37TR93
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	23h19m18s.50
RA (top/left)	23h24m32s.47
RA (top/right)	23h06m20s.63
RA (bottom/right)	23h14m30s.99
RA (bottom/left)	23h32m11s.76

Dec (center)	+60°38′34″.3
Dec (top/left)	+62°05′56″.6
Dec (top/right)	+60°39′53″.3
Dec (bottom/right)	+59°10′26″.0
Dec (bottom/left)	+60°32′28″.4

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Lobster Bubble

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