NGC 1514, also called the Crystal Ball nebula, is a small planetary nebula in the constellation Taurus.  Spanning only about 90 arcseconds, it is a good target for longer focal length imaging systems.  The bright central star Psi Tauri shines at magnitude 5.22, presenting an additional imaging challenge, as the nebula itself is only about 10th magnitude overall.  Imaging this subject in narrowband levels the playing a field a bit, as most of the light from the central star does not make it through the filters. 

This object presented a surprise when I tried to stack the Oxygen III subs take through the Chroma 3 nm Oiii filter.  Because the field of view is not too wide  and the stars are weak with narrowband filters, none of my preferred programs were able to register the Oxygen III frames.  I went through a painfully tedious process of stretching Levels in each fits file and saving it as a grayscale TIFF in order to bring up the brightness of the stars enough to create an Oxygen III stack.  It worked, so no complaints here.

The Hydrogen Alpha and Oxygen III data for this image were acquired with the C11 EdgeHD at 2000 mm and f/7.  Color comes from an HOO combination with a mixture of H and O in the green channel.  Star colors also came from HOO, so they are not quite natural.  However, the narrowband filters are unable to capture the faint dust that surrounds this object, so I decided to shoot some luminance in an attempt to capture some of the dust.

The luminance data were captured with the same camera (QSI 660ws) and the Esprit 100ED refractor operating at f/3.6 with the Starizona Apex-L reducer.  I chose this approach because it is possible to go deep on dust much more quickly than it is with the C11 EdgeHD at f/7.  I was a little disappointed at the outcome.  Although there is ample dust surrounding the PN, there is not much structure in it that I can capture from my Bortle 4+ location.  The widefield refractor image shows that the sky background is quite bright around the PN, but it is fairly level in intensity.  In order to extract some of the dust, I cropped the luminance data to the same size and orientation as the HOO data and removed the stars using Starnet++.  I then applied a fairly strong Gaussian blur to the image to smooth away any artifacts from star removal.  I could have used the three hours of clear skies to image something else besides a blurred, starless dust background, but I was expecting the dust to be brighter and to have a little more contrast than it does. 

Finally, I used StarSpikes Pro to add spikes to the two bright stars at the edges of the frame just for cosmetic effects.  I like the way they look, and I don't think they detract from the subject.