Quite a few shark captures lately out in the community lately and it has grown on me. Just wanted to add it to the collection and gain more experience at dark nebula processing.
Acquisition:Nothing fancy done for acquisition besides new moon timing and lots of exposures with Luminance being the key for me. LRGB mono, but OSC looks great for a lot of other astroimagers that shot this target. I chose mono since I was worried about background noise in the dark background areas - which of course is like 85% of this target! Short-ish exposure are fine because of the two reflection nebulas.
Processing:Definitely one of the most challenging targets to do right. I'd rank this up there with 'The Squid' in complexity. I don't think I was able to get the sharp dark and bright contrast I admire in other imager's shots, but this is about the best I can do at this point in my learning journey.
The key for me was:
- Mask those really bright stars and even a bit of the reflection nebula - be sure to dilate your mask depending on your halo size
- Repeat stretches at really odd places in the histogram (like the darkest sections) - experiment on locations you would never touch for other targets
- Invert the mask and go back to the previous bullet several times.
- Go easy on the RGB color stretch - there's plenty of contrasting colors with the reflection nebula. If you go too far, you get mottling in the dark nebula structure
- Luminance makes a large difference on this target. Other targets I find pure RGB and skipping L is better some times. Not for this one. Denoise the L, deconvolution to taste, apply L to RGB. Raise the curves on the combined LRGB to desired brightness.
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