Celestial hemisphere:  Southern  ·  Constellation: Scorpius (Sco)  ·  Contains:  IC 4628
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IC 4628 The Prawn Nebula in Scorpius 4 Panel Mosaic in NB, Ian Parr
IC 4628 The Prawn Nebula in Scorpius 4 Panel Mosaic in NB
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IC 4628 The Prawn Nebula in Scorpius 4 Panel Mosaic in NB

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
IC 4628 The Prawn Nebula in Scorpius 4 Panel Mosaic in NB, Ian Parr
IC 4628 The Prawn Nebula in Scorpius 4 Panel Mosaic in NB
Powered byPixInsight

IC 4628 The Prawn Nebula in Scorpius 4 Panel Mosaic in NB

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Description

The Prawn Nebula, also known as IC 4628, is an Magnitude 7.1 HII emission nebula located around 6,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Scorpius.
It is about 250 light-years across and it spans over three full moons in the sky. The region is bathed in invisible ultraviolet light from nearby hot, massive young stars which strip electrons from the Hydrogen causing it to glow. 

The first time I did this back in 2020 the result wasn't great. Mosaic's are always a handful at tne best of times.
In 2023, Pixinsight and its new tools took processing capabilities went to the next level.  So with the same data the quality of the result can improve dramatically. (Along with a  few more years practise navigating the Garden of Forking Paths).

BlurXTerminator is initialy used only for  Correction on each channel followed by the PSF Calculation that is manually specified for a gentle Star Reduction.

Photometric Mosaic  to stitch the Linear frames.
Wow! On 2x upscaled Drizzled data that took hours even on a very, very fast computer ... I look forward to Pixinsight implementing general GPU processing as Russell Croman AI tools fly once you implement CUDA (e.g. 18 minutes down to just over a minute!).

Color Calibration with SpectroPhotoMetricColorCalibration is brilliant! Less Andy Warhol and more J. M. W. Turner.

GraXpert for gradient removal.

Generalised Hyperbolic Stretch for stretching to Non-Linear. 

Color calibration is now so good that STF+Histogram Transformation can return an almost perfect histogram with very little fuss but GHS is worth the extra yard, esp for Narrowband.

StarXTerminator to seperate Stars and Starless.

On the Starless, Color Masking and Curves to tame the rampant hideous green.

Finally for Starless I use Local Histogram Equalisation,  HDR Multiscale Transform and then and only then, gentle Non-Stellar Sharpening with a Range Selection mask.

Finally NoiseXTerminator on the Starless.

For the Stars I use the Invert, SCNR Green, re-Invert trick for killing magenta stars and then use Curves Transformation to raise saturation for star color boost and I lower star brightness a tad.

Finally recombination in Pixelmath.

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IC 4628 The Prawn Nebula in Scorpius 4 Panel Mosaic in NB, Ian Parr