This was shot, once again, with my 6" achromat using a 0.65X reducer to give me ~f/4.3 at ~650mm focal length. This has quickly become one of my favorite rigs. I haven't focused in on Pickering's Triangle much before this, tending to spend more time on the Western and Eastern Veil structures, but I got a good piece of it recently and decided it needed more direct attention. There's a ton of detail going on in there!
This is rendered in the palette I like for nebulae that are mostly Hydrogen and Oxygen signal. It uses Ha for red and Oiii for blue, with a synthetic green channel made of a function of the two (essentially, Ha where that's strong, Oiii where that's strong). I love this palette for the Veil Nebula objects and it's different from the usual red/cyan HOO that you see from this part of the sky.
This originated from the following article:
https://thecoldestnights.com/2020/06/pixinsight-dynamic-narrowband-combinations-with-pixelmath/Smoke from the wildfires tried to prevent me from getting this! I can't shoot anything below about 45 degrees altitude, but higher than that my cameras can mostly see through the haze. It took three nights to get ~8 usable hours of data, and I threw almost as much out. It was so bad that at one point last night my guide camera couldn't find any stars. I went out to check on it and I could only see first magnitude stars with the naked eye despite there being no clouds!
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