I've always wondered the way to fully blend narrowband data into broadband data and, and the final result should have the details of the narrowband and the nice colors of the broadband. This image is an attempt.

Barnard 3 is a target in rich colors - just like the rocks in Death Valley national park. The process got to find the path to pop them up. The final result might not have the "traditional" look & feel. But it's a nice chance to practice to blend Ha into both Lum and Red channel. It's indeed a fun process, and the experience is gratifying.

The dual-scope setup definitely has its huge advantage. This time, I felt the challenge of utilizing the FOVs from both scope. And one more step during integration still bothers me - I use Astro Pixel Processor's Mosaic registration mode to stack all subs from both scopes in one shot (with one of 130's sub as the reference, so basically 106's sub is binned up). In this way, I lost the chance to use the powerful MureDenoise. Wondering if it's an option to stack the master for each scope, do MureDenoise then stack two masters for SNR improvement. Hmm. There are other issues such as FWHM impact after binning up the data from the scope of wider FOV, optimal exposure time for different apertures...

Wrote an ASCOM driver for our motorized cover/flat-panel, then found out only NINA supports the CoverCalibrator device in the nightly build. But it's a lot of fun to understand how ASCOM driver works. 😊

Post-processing Update

Guess I was rushed on the previous versions. there are a couple of goals that I didn't reach:



- The noise was not controlled very well in the outer regions

- The red H-II emission signal areas beneath the dust cloud was not that great.

- Stars seem a little too big and too busy in most areas that I wanted to highlight.

- Tighter cropping actually removed some of the ROI that I intended to show.



Uploaded version 8. It's actually quite fun to reprocess. I found lots of small galaxies well captured in the original data. And there is a little thing (PGC 13438) at the lower right corner that I am not sure it's a PN or a galaxy.

Post-processing Update

Thanks to Luca and my AP buddies. Fixed the bloated stars with a different approach to the stretching method. Now it looks indeed much better.

Post-processing Update

Brightened up the dark dust clouds a little bit more. A touch of softening to the stars to expose the clouds better. Version 10 is it.

#TeamNoctuaDSNM