Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Monoceros (Mon)  ·  Contains:  B37  ·  IC 2169  ·  IC 446  ·  IC 447  ·  LBN 898  ·  LBN 901  ·  LBN 903  ·  LBN 904  ·  LDN 1607  ·  NGC 2245  ·  NGC 2247  ·  VdB77  ·  VdB78  ·  VdB79
IC 447 - Dreyer's Nebula, Jonathan Piques
Powered byPixInsight

IC 447 - Dreyer's Nebula

IC 447 - Dreyer's Nebula, Jonathan Piques
Powered byPixInsight

IC 447 - Dreyer's Nebula

Equipment

Loading...

Acquisition details

Loading...

Description

Here we have a beautiful blue little reflection nebula, with lots of visual interest.  You don't see a ton of images of this object out there, so I thought I would give it a shot.  

The focal points for processing here were a) preserving color, and b) bringing in the faint stuff without causing the incredibly busy star field to overwhelm the image.  So I ended up approaching it similarly to the way I did with IC 63/Ghosts of Cassiopeia.  For the RGB portion, I used arcsinhstretch on a half-stretched RGB combine to preserve as much color information as possible.  I left it just a touch underexposed to again preserve as much color saturation and information as possible before applying luminance.   For the luminance, even though there's a fair amount of wispy stuff around, I started hitting diminishing returns around the 5 - 6 hour mark.  Once I had my luminance master, I used a combination of a maskedstretch followed by a lower-than-normal normal stretch to bring our detail in the bright regions as well as highlight the dimmer dusty regions.  I applied an attenuated HDRMT to another version and then screen blended that with the unaltered master to get a luminance that had a less busy star field but still showed off some of the faint elements. Once I applied this luminance, I used an attenuated application of the Astroswell star de-emphasizer script and then curves adjustments to taste. 

For improvement in the future, I think this could've used more integration on the colors--I've seen other images that hold far more red from Ha throughout the image.  I think I could also do a better job keeping the noise at bay through more integration and/or more skillful noise reduction (I really don't like to do noise reduction, and am not good at it). For now though, it more or less fits the image that was in my head when I set out, so I'm putting it down for now.  I welcome any comments / suggestions.

Comments

Sky plot

Sky plot

Histogram

IC 447 - Dreyer's Nebula, Jonathan Piques