The famous Heart and Soul nebulae together with the Double Cluster in Perseus.

My third attempt at narrowband imaging and this time I've managed to get a result I'm pretty happy with, especially given how bad the seeing was that night. The target was low down to the Northwest, and I was shooting from a suburban garden with bad light pollution and enough haze that I struggled to see more than about a dozen stars in the whole sky.

The 90 subs were 60s each and shot with a Samyang 85mm lens wide open at f1.8 because I forgot to stop it down, which is probably why some of the stars are distorted by what I suspect is sagittal astigmatism. I didn't have much shooting time before the target moved out of sight behind the neighbouring house so fortunately that mistake allowed me to capture a better and brighter image of the nebulae than if I'd done things properly.

I'm surprised at just how well the image captures the finer details of the nebulae such as the Fish Head and the structure of the filament extending upwards from the Heart. These are particularly clear in the negative version of the image which I've included in the revisions for interest, along with a colourised version that is my attempt at showing the true colour of the image through the H-alpha filter.

The Baader 7nm Ha filter has impressed me even more by delivering enough contrast to make the faint nebulosity stand out against the sky background despite the conditions being so bad that I wouldn't normally have bothered trying to photograph anything since even a 12s exposure without the filter (while I was lining up the shot) was enough to give an almost totally white image.

The performance of the full spectrum-modified FujiFilm X-A3 is perhaps even more impressive considering the limitations of a Bayer pattern sensor when shooting narrowband. I'm sure a dedicated mono astro cam would be better still but there's a lot to be said for the low weight, simplicity, and short setup time of untethered imaging with a little camera like the X-A3.

I've always loved the look of high contrast B&W images taken in H-alpha, probably because it reminds me of first getting into astronomy as a kid and seeing beautiful photos of deep sky objects shot on hypered Kodak Technical Pan. I'm looking forward to having a go at capturing my own versions of those incredible images, although it shouldn't be anything like as difficult a task as it would have been in those days. The sensor in the X-A3 and the computing power at my disposal are both far beyond what was the state of the art back then and every aspect of the workflow has become easier and faster.

I have a couple more filters on order so the next goal is to capture an image in SHO.