Bubble, Lobster Claw, and NGC 7538 | A Data Chimera (Kevin Morefield)

Bubble, Lobster Claw, and NGC 7538 | A Data Chimera

The Bubble, Lobster Claw and NGC 7538 form a nice triad in Cassiopeia. Estimated distances for all three are between 9000-11000 ly so they are at least neighbors, if not getting friendly.

This widefield was shot principally in November from my backyard with the FSQ106 and QHY600M. But since I had previously shot the Bubble, Lobster claw, and 7538 with the CDK14 at the observatory, I couldn't see any reason not to blend some of that data in too. So the data were collected using three cameras, two scopes, three mounts, two sets of filters, and from two states over four years.

The long focal length data was aligned to the widefield and added at the 1.46" image scale rather than the .73" or .61" scales originally captured at. I thought it would jarring to see these small areas with much higher resolution than the rest of the image. Also, I would have had to upscale the image to over 200 megapixels if I tried to use the smaller image scale.

Ha was used for Luminance and the long FL data was blended in at about 50/50 with the short FL data. My idea was more about increasing SNR than sharpness. In fact, after reducing the long FL data to 1.46" it wasn't much sharper than the backyard short FL data. I also blended a little of the color data in from the older images.

The SHO mix I settled on here is as follows:

Red = SII*.7 + Ha*3

Green = Min(S,H,O)*.5 + Ha*.5

Blue = OIII

Above, I'm only including the data captured last month in the stats. I would have no idea how to address the partial inclusion of the older data!

Original
Final
G

G

Description: This image just wasn't as good as it should be given the data. Noise clean-up, Color balance shift to more blue less red (helps with over saturation), curves to brighten the shadows a bit.

Uploaded: ...

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	4090143
PixInsight job	Q033LC11GJAH9TVCZTYEF41DVMNU59BA
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	23h16m04s.83
RA (top/left)	23h19m36s.41
RA (top/right)	23h30m01s.38
RA (bottom/right)	23h12m05s.22
RA (bottom/left)	23h03m09s.47

Dec (center)	+60°59′14″.4
Dec (top/left)	+59°00′38″.7
Dec (top/right)	+62°08′57″.0
Dec (bottom/right)	+62°57′27″.3
Dec (bottom/left)	+59°44′32″.8

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