Another target that I have had on the list for a while finally ticked off in the midst of this crappy Melbourne winter!
The Dark Wolf (SL-17) in narrowband.
Given the Oiii is almost non existent in this target, it was a task to bring out subtle separation between the Ha and Sii signal and avoid the dominating red hues of Ha which tends to wash out some of the finer details. This is still a SHO mapped image with .75 SCNR applied in Pixinsight and then masked curves work to get to this.
I ended up shifting the hues slightly to reveal separation between the "dark" dust of the Wolf and the dust that surrounds it and then used the Ha starless layer as Luminosity.
It also helped me tease out a bit more of the supernova remnant to the right of the image. Hence the overall orange/red tones which I kind of like and haven't seen anything similar.
Surprisingly, I was also able to resolve some colour in a tiny planetary nebula to the extreme left which looks more like a double star at first glance, designated as PK342+00.1, couldnt find too much detail about this, but I have included a blown up image of this as well below.
Data was drizzled 2X which helped reveal some more detail in the image and at full resolution on a 4K screen looks amazing!! Maybe ended up slightly softer overall than I was anticipating but I decided to stop when the colours and separation got to my liking. I was also able to get some decent star colour, albeit narrowband, doesnt always work depending on the starfield.
Total integration time was 14 hours of 5 min subs, 5 hours in Ha, 5 hours in Sii and 4 hours in Oiii.
Taken with the Esprit 100ED and ZWO 1600GT.
Processed across Pixinsight and Photoshop.
PK 342+00.1
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