Mu Cephei / Herschel's Garnet Star / Erakis (Anthony Quintile)

Mu Cephei / Herschel's Garnet Star / Erakis

I had wanted to focus on this area of the sky ever since I first shot IC 1396/Elephant Trunk Nebula and "discovered" the little planetary nebula, PK100+04.1. While searching for other examples, I found that the appeal of the Elephant Trunk seems to leave this area a bit under represented, I think. It's a pretty cool collection of dust and gas.

I wrastled with some sort of collimation (?) issue with my scope during this session which caused some funny shaped stars in part of the image, and I think contributed to one of the diffraction spikes from Mu Cephei being a bit more pronounced. BlurX and a mask and curves helped with these issues, but this was less than perfect data.

I have really been enjoying GHS and been using Adam Block's explanations from his Fundamentals courses to really bear down on adding contrast at certain brightnesses. It's really a great tool and simplifies and hones the use of curves dramatically.

Original
B
C
D
Final
E

B

Description: Increased saturation with Curves

Uploaded: ...

C

Description: It took me a while to come to terms with what I was not happy with on the first iteration of this image.

Basically I was a bit overzealous with GHS and overcooked contrast and brightness which made the nebulae look a bit too clumpy.

This time I used a simple HistogramTransformation, and then some fine tuning of contrast in CurvesTransformation to get where I wanted to be with the starless image. Sometimes the cool new tool (GHS) isn't the right tool for the job.

I started this reprocess with the intent to try out the new BlurX and the StarReduction Script.

The StarReduction Script is great, and I ended further reducing the stars in this image with it on the "soft" setting because there is a lot of subtle darker nebulae and I wanted to highlight those.

This data/integration is problematic, probably/mostly (?) because of an issue I caused with astigmatism, read about that here: https://www.astrobin.com/forum/c/astrophotography/equipment/skywatcher-quattro-250p-astigmatism-tip-maybe-helpful-to-others/?page=1#post-148598

I am having issues with the color of blue stars using the new BlurX AI4, especially with this image. I tried the AI4 on a better dataset and, although the results were much better, the issue was still present. Basically, some blue stars wind up white with magenta halos. I am trying to communicate with Russ about this, but I suspect I am doing something wrong, (I swear I am doing everything according to the directions, and I have tried scores of different workflows at this point), I am the only one who has noticed the issue so far, or something else. I don't know, but it's pretty frustrating. I keep reverting to the AI2 and getting the better result that I have had to date, so the only wildcard as far as I can tell is the new AI4.

If you are finding a similar result, please let Russ know, and maybe let me know so I don't feel like I am taking crazy pills.

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D

Description: Minor Curves adjust to bring darkest nebula away from near-clipping values.

Uploaded: ...

E

Description: Adjusted down black point blues and greens in Photoshop Levels.

I really wish I knew how to do this particular adjustment in PI or, better yet, get a truly color balanced background/image at the DBE/SPCC/BN stage(s) with really dark nebulae in an image.

I had a discussion with someone about this, and I need to do more experimenting...

Uploaded: ...

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	9021584
PixInsight job	PNGHT810JW94CA3FPKPQO10485I421JA
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	21h41m18s.22
RA (top/left)	21h49m22s.71
RA (top/right)	21h44m29s.94
RA (bottom/right)	21h33m13s.91
RA (bottom/left)	21h38m16s.93

Dec (center)	+58°29′21″.5
Dec (top/left)	+58°28′22″.9
Dec (top/right)	+59°27′38″.4
Dec (bottom/right)	+58°28′26″.2
Dec (bottom/left)	+57°30′45″.7

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