The 20-light years section shown here is just a small part of the Heart and Soul nebulae. This large star-forming complex is about 6,500 light-years from us, in the Perseus arm of our own Milky Way galaxy.
The RASC Robotic Telescope images were taken in November to December 2019 and 2021 from the Sierra Remote Observatories in Auberry, California. The 0.4 meter telescope is an RCOS 16" f/8.9 (3550mm focal length) with an SBIG STX16803 16MP (4096 x 4096) CCD Camera, and a Paramount ME mount. Using SBIG Ha (7nm), OIII (8.5nm), SII (8nm) filters, 31 images of 30 minutes each were taken, for a total of 46.5 hrs of narrowband images!
I calibrated, registered and stacked the subs in DeepSkyStacker, processed the result in StarTools in SHO, then did final adjustments in Photoshop. A shout out to
Jacob Heppell for sharing his Photoshop processing, this was so helpful to me. Note please, my vision is not the same as Jacob's, and any faults lie on me only. I also need to shout out to APF-R, an amazing tool to bring out detail (to my mind a multi-scale unsharp mask). The process is one that NASA has used extensively, and is simply amazing at reducing non-sharp parts of the image.
Finally, this SHO image is probably not exactly what is typically shown. I do like to show all colors in my images, so I try to avoid if I can, SHO processes that destroy all the Ha green channel. Ha is dominate, so while we don't need to have Ha dominate (which looks bad in SHO anyway), hopefully that green signal is still visible here, but contributing still to a nice color palette.
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