Weinberger 1-10 is a very faint planetary nebula embedded in an area of Ha emission nebula in the Cygnus complex.  It lies roughly 1,400 light years away and has a surface brightness of only 24 magnitude making this a very challenging object to capture.  Even more faint is an outer shell that is just visible when zoomed in.

Planetary nebula are average stars like our Sun that are reaching the end of their lives.  As they run out of fuel they begin to shed their outer outer atmospheres.  What we see here is a typical expanding bubble of ionized Oxygen gas that is moving away from the central star which is visible as a tiny blue dot at the center of the nebula.  

I found this area interesting because it is kind of just-off the normal trail.  Like a golf ball buried in the rough.  It is surrounded by beautiful and popular imaging targets that are well represented on Astrobin.   This little PN however seems to be a somewhat overlooked target that in my opinion is worthy of the spotlight.    

Processing the image was a lot more challenging than I expected it would be.  There is very little difference between the Ha and S2 signal.  And the O3 signal is SUPER low with a underwhelming SNR despite being located at a dark sky site and collecting nearly 17 hours of O3 data with the moon below the horizon.  Just coming up with an RGB image that has some degree of color variation was a challenge.  I ended up individually stretching the starless channels before combining them, which I rarely do.  This gave me more control over the color pallet which helped with such a tiny margin to work with.  After many iterations of stretches and pixel math combination formulas, I landed on an RGB image that I liked.

I then created a separate luminance image using a different combination formula with the aim of bringing out the best detail from each channel.  Finally, I added the luminance layer onto the RGB and then screened in the separately processed RGB stars.

I am pretty happy with the final result.  The faint outer shell of the O3 envelope is just visible.



Hope you like it.
CS