WR-134: RGB Stars, Hox Stars, No Stars?

OTA: COS 14.5 inch
Camera: SBIG STX-16803
Observatory: Deep Sky West, NM

EXPOSURES:                
R:  8 x 300sec.            
G: 10 x 300    
B: 17 x300        
H: 26 x 1800        
O:  9 x 1800        
Total exposure    13.5 hours

Image Width: 36 arc-minutes
Processed by Alex Woronow (2021) using PixInsight, Topaz, NB_Assist, SWT

Digging back into images done in 2018, I came across this unprocessed data set. The camera is a bit out-of-date, and the data are exceptionally noisy by modern standards, but I'm not unhappy with the results. The emission lines, Ha and OIII, have been rid of their continuum fluxes and rendered in their true colors. (That is, Ha is red with a small percentage of green. Hbeta is synthesized as a constant proportion of the Ha intensity. And OIII is a teal color.)

The three images represent three options for image star content. Image A is the starless version (produced using StarNet2), the parent of the other two images. Image B has had the entire cadre of RGB stars reinstated in the starless image, while Image D has the HOx stars reinstated. (The 'x' in Hox indicates that no image was directly tagged as being the green-channel image, as described in the last paragraph.)

You can click each image in the image library to the right of the main display. The comparison between the RGB-starred and starless images for this image follows the trend. The stars pretty much hide the subtle details. This effect must be a visual effect generated in our brain. Perhaps the brain prioritizes bright objects over dark ones? It is known to favor focusing on high-contrast patches. (That seems a counterproductive evolution attribute: most game animals are not high contrast nor glow-in-the-dark. (The RGB restarred image has the same level of detail in the nebula as the starless image. The nebula in the star-containing image may be a bit brighter, which is a byproduct of the starring code. However, that brightening should not diminish the faint detail and probably makes it more visible. To check, I removed the stars from the restarred image. Yep, all the detail is there!)

Image D might represent a compromise between starless and RGB starred images. The stars in image D are from the Hox image. Star sizes and brightnesses diminish when captured through narrowband filters, making them less intrusive than those in the RGB-stars image. That's my preference. Be interested to hear your view.

WR-134 is a Wolf-Rayet star, as the name indicates. WR stars have very great masses and short lives and often shed their outer shells. There are only about 600 WR stars known. This one, WR-134, is the hot blue star near the center of the image.

The blue nebula, the gas that the WR star ejected, goes entirely around the star. After I discarded at least 1/3 of the images as sub-standard, this data set has too little exposure time to reveal the fainter parts. Sorry!

Thanks for looking,
Alex