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Shelob's Lair (Mark 3), Paul Hancock
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Shelob's Lair (Mark 3)

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
Shelob's Lair (Mark 3), Paul Hancock
Powered byPixInsight

Shelob's Lair (Mark 3)

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

Shelob lies in wait, anticipating the harmonious twang as her next meal becomes entrapped in her web. You can see the remains of a small scorpion to her left, a previous meal.

The Tarantula nebula is a massive HII region within the Large Magellanic Cloud. The weather was briefly good here and the seeing was exceptional. This is 6 hours of SHO data captured from my backyard. Hopefully the weather will clear again so I can continue to capture photons of this beautiful region of space.

I am still playing around with the framing on this one and finding my own way of applying Eric Coles tone mapping techniques. I also decided to use all of the Ha data as luminance rather than being overly selective, the moderate loss in sharpness is more than made up for in my eyes by the drastic reduction in background noise.

I am still hoping to capture much more OIII and SII data in the coming months, as the Ha stack looks good now.

Let me know if you think I'm barking up the wrong tree in terms of my luminance and colour palette as compared to Mark 2.

Comments

Revisions

    Shelob's Lair (Mark 3), Paul Hancock
    Original
    Shelob's Lair (Mark 3), Paul Hancock
    B
    Shelob's Lair (Mark 3), Paul Hancock
    C
    Shelob's Lair (Mark 3), Paul Hancock
    D
    Shelob's Lair (Mark 3), Paul Hancock
    G
    Shelob's Lair (Mark 3), Paul Hancock
    I
    Shelob's Lair (Mark 3), Paul Hancock
    J
    Shelob's Lair (Mark 3), Paul Hancock
    K
    Shelob's Lair (Mark 3), Paul Hancock
    L
    Shelob's Lair (Mark 3), Paul Hancock
    M
  • Final
    Shelob's Lair (Mark 3), Paul Hancock
    N

B

Description: Whoops, uploaded an earlier version before final tweaking.

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C

Description: Bye Bye neon purple and blue.

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D

Description: Manged to use a range mask to take the more colourful sho image and add in the more duotone tarantula. The best of both worlds now.

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G

Description: Another reframing. I think this one is my favourite so far. Shelob take up the bottom right of frame along with all the previous meals and detritus ensnared in her web. Which contrasts with the blackness and emptiness of space that takes up the remainder of the frame. Of note, the stars within Shelob's web are colourful, while the stars within the blackness of space are fairly monotone

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I

Description: Same as G, I forgot to add the luminance! Thought it looked a bit soft.

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J

Description: Same as I but tighter framing, still playing with it. I do like the fairly monochrome empty space, I feel it adds to the story.

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K

Description: Went back and reprocessed the HA luminance again to tone it down and try and reduce noise even further.

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L

Description: This is version 8 now, another complete reprocess.

I took the very best Ha frames and gave them a very mild stretch before removing the stars. This starless image was taken into topaz denoise and I spent a very long time playing with the settings. I decided only to denoise using the lowlight setting and did not apply any sharpening, in fact I used the recover original detail slider as I felt even at a noise reduction of only 2 it was still too much. The recover original detail slider works like an opacity layer in PS, it blends in the noise reduced version with the original. I then returned the image to PI, did a HDRmultiscale transform and then added the stars back.

For the colour I simply used the previous version, used MLT with all layers off except the residual and then again took that into topaz denoise and hit it hard with noise reduction and no sharpening.

Finally I used the Ha layer as a luminance for the blurred and denoised colour data and reduced the stars using the Adam Block de-emphasis technique.

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M

Description: A year on and I have reverted to using MLT and TGV denoise over Mure Denoise, I think it works better for my data. I have also employed a sharpening technique I saw used by Visible Dark. I didn't incorporate the Sii data into this version as it is just not enough and simply adds noise for very little gain.

Uploaded: ...

N

Title: Shelob's Lair (Mark 4)

Description: Reprocessed using my latest methods in PI.

1.GHS to lightly stretch the Ha and Oiii.
2. StarXTerminator to remove the stars.
3. GHS for further stretching, aiming to bring the Ha and Oiii to roughly the same background and median brightness.
4. Create a power of inverted pixels image of ha x oiii. Then use GHS to stretch it.
5. Use pixelmath to create a Foraxx palette HOO style image.
6. NoiseXTerminator.
7. Put the stars back.

Uploaded: ...

Sky plot

Sky plot

Histogram

Shelob's Lair (Mark 3), Paul Hancock