IC 405 / Flaming Star Nebula with Aur 16, 17, 18, 19 and IQ Aur (Anthony Quintile)

IC 405 / Flaming Star Nebula with Aur 16, 17, 18, 19 and IQ Aur

Since I first tried to shoot IC 405 I have been intrigued with the 5 stars next to it. Their diverse colors and appealing pattern is part of what I wanted to capture with the nebula, and I was able to get some nice framing and squeeze the good parts in with the Starizona Nexus .75x FR/CC for Newtonians.

This image is only* 22 hours. I've been trying to get 30 hours+ on any target, but the weather here in Northern Arizona has not cooperated enough to get that this month. This is also one of the brighter targets I've shot recently, so I think 22 hours is probably enough. If I had been trying to capture the faint "tail" of IC 405, I think I'd want more time.

(* "only", and I shouldn't be complaining about the skies here ultimately.)

I am slowly adding Pixinsight steps to my process with the guidance of @Adam Block 's Fundamentals courses. This is the first time I've employed Deconvolution successfully. It is a pretty magical tool, at least in the finer detail. It's just enough to cheat some less-than-optimal seeing conditions, which were definitely present for much of this stack.

If you are trying to really understand how Pixinsight works to best be able to employ it, I highly recommend Adam's courses.

Original
B
Final
C

B

Title: Complete reprocess from original integration

Description: I've always felt like my original processing of this was a bit flat/boring and I wanted to apply all the new XTerminators, GHS and some other new found skillz to make it pop a bit more.

Although my original processing had employed deconvolution, BlurXTerminator is so much easier to use and gives such a better result for me.

Although I achieved my goal with making this image more exciting, I think I may have over done some of the contrasty-ness too early while stretching in GHS, which lead to some issues in the brightest red areas when saturating to bring up the color globally. This is a picky concern on my part, but there is always something to learn when processing.

Adam Block asked to use this data as the sample set for the latest edition of his "Fundamentals" course. It's fun to see folks on the various social media sites asking questions about processing and referring to this dataset. I am glad if my stuff has helped other folks to progress their skills!

Uploaded: ...

C

Description: GHS is new to me and I got a little too excited about its effects in one part of the image and missed that it was too harsh in other places. I ended up going back and applying GHS with a bit lighter hand since I had clipped the saturation on some of the nebula and lost some fine details.

In the process I managed to eke out some fainter nebula for an all around better image I think.

Uploaded: ...

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	7618539
PixInsight job	A1T63WEG2225FZAKYZQNTQK08OT73M98
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	05h17m06s.32
RA (top/left)	05h12m24s.50
RA (top/right)	05h16m49s.33
RA (bottom/right)	05h21m45s.29
RA (bottom/left)	05h17m23s.83

Dec (center)	+34°09′05″.7
Dec (top/left)	+34°36′37″.3
Dec (top/right)	+33°04′50″.8
Dec (bottom/right)	+33°40′52″.9
Dec (bottom/left)	+35°13′22″.1

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