Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Cassiopeia (Cas)  ·  Contains:  IC 1795  ·  IC 1805  ·  NGC 896  ·  Sh2-190
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Heart Nebula HaRGB, John Willis
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Heart Nebula HaRGB

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
Heart Nebula HaRGB, John Willis
Powered byPixInsight

Heart Nebula HaRGB

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Description

For this one, I tried to combine several things to get a better HaRGB combine than I normally end up with.

First, I ran the Ha channel through Starnet++ to get a starless image, and stretched it enough to get good contrast throughout. At the same time, I focused on getting the stars to look as good as I could in the RGB image, not worrying as much about bringing out nebula detail.

Then I used the Pixinsight NBRGB combine script, setting the weight on the HA to be much higher than default (about 4-5 instead of 1.2). That let the nebula come through really strongly, without messing up the stars since it was a starless image.

The high value on the combine means it's crazy super Red in the nebula, which looks really unnatural. So I then used a colormask to select just the red, and I adjusted the Red/Green box (CIE * a component) very slightly more toward green, giving a more natural color to the nebula.

After that, standard noise reduction, stretching, curves, and other small processes to get to the final result.

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Heart Nebula HaRGB, John Willis