Sep 3rd, 2016 – Heart Nebula (IC1805)

I will never forget this target and what I had to do to capture it, it was a long weekend and Monday was the Labor Day holiday, I kept driving every day to Lake Hudson State Park to capture both the Heart and Soul Nebula, the bad thing is because it was a long weekend the park was busy and lots of cars were shining their high beam (because they can) but with that I was imaging Narrowband so it didn’t really affected me and all I can say is it was an epic three nights imaging session. Mainly all I did was arrive to Hudson around 9pm, setup and start imaging till dawn, then pack up and go have breakfast then sleep till afternoon, finish some stuff at home pack and drive to Hudson again. Mainly because I’ve never had three beautiful nights in Michigan ever and I abused it to the Max.

Here is some technical info and processing steps, this was a four panels mosaic, each panel was captured with three narrowband filters (Astronomic 12nm Ha / OIII / SII), each panel was roughly 20ish subs 120sec each, using my Celestron EdgeHD 9.25” with Hyperstar adapter and ZWO ASI1600MM-cool camera at 300 gain.

Processing was a bit challenging but briefly there were the steps

1) Stitched each four panel using PixInsight which was very challenging to create three master frames for each filter.

2) Linear fit each frame to match their background which helps when you combine all three frames to create a color image.

3) Used Maskstretch tool to stretch the histogram of each frame

4) Removed the stars from each frame using StarNet++ and later cleaned artifacts using Clone Stamp tool.

5) Added the un-stretched stars to the starless frames

6) Color combine all three frames to create a color image (Red=SII, Green=Ha, Blue=OII)

7) Start playing with Color Mix and enhancing the Nebula and keeping the background noise low

The final image were downsized to 15,000 x 11,000 pixels, hope you like it