When the moon is up, you spend time on bright targets. Flaming Star, even though I've done it before, deserved another chance utilizing new techniques. This time we gathered all the Ha and Sii data while the moon was up. Unfortunately I hadn't quite completed my SHO filters on both telescopes, so the OGMA Esprit took on the task of gathering all the Ha data, while the QHY Esprit spent all it's time on Sulfur data. Eventually the moon went down and both scopes focused on LRGB data. The crazy thing is, with two scopes, the 16 hours of LRGB data in this image was all acquired on a single night. I grabbed a couple hours of Oiii data near the end of the acquisition stage, but ultimately decided to use the Oiii data acquired last year by my 8" newtonian combined to build up a reasonable Oiii signal. Ultimately however, the Oiii signal hardly does anything to an image such as this one. Most of the structure in Oiii is actually continuum data from the broadband structures.

Data combination was fairly straight forward, RGB data was combined, calibrated, and denoised. Luminance was added. Using pixelmath, I did a slight subtraction of the Ha signal, leaving MOSTLY broadband elements such as the 'tree' in the center, as well as the dust lanes around and near the bottom. While the top left reflection nebula was there, I completely ignored it during the process. The results were quite amazing. Once the dust was enhanced, each narrowband channel was processed and added using pixel math. Ha favors the red channel, Sii favors the red channel again, with a roughly 50% mix into the green and blue channels. Oiii data is almost exclusively blue, with a little bit of green in the mix.

Give me your honest thoughts on this one. What do you think? I struggled to decide if I wanted to crop this image down and focus on the bright details, or leave the full frame and show off the beautiful, less seen reflection nebula, LEDA 16963, on the top left of the frame. This is the first time I've been happy with the outcome from my backyard utilizing my color scheme for narrowband combination. The details, are incredible, yet it retains the look at feel of a broadband image.