This area in Cassiopia is one of the most interesting regions of the sky, and also one of the most photographed by narrowband imagers. This shot captures the heart of the heart nebula, and a portion of the "top" of the heart. I've
previously captured the "double double" of the heart & soul nebula and Perseus double cluster, and done a closeup of the "
fishhead" at the bottom of the heart.
While I didn't have room to capture the whole structure at this focal length, I decided to resist the urge to just crop around the heart and show a portion of the rim as well. I feel there is a bias towards making deep sky objects look more like their namesakes, and by not seeing the full heart shape here it is easier to focus our attention on the peculiar shape of the rim.
Instead of capturing extra OIII and SII data here to bring out the faint signal, I shot those channels in bin4 with longer subs, then upsampled before final registration. Stacking in Siril (2x drizzle), Starnet++ v2, light denoising with Topaz, then color mapping and minor edits in Photoshop. I recently create a Siril users group here and posted my
current processing workflow for anyone that wants more details (or has ideas for how I could improve).
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