Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Cepheus (Cep)  ·  Contains:  HD200775  ·  Iris Nebula  ·  LBN 487  ·  LDN 1174  ·  NGC 7023
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Iris Nebula , NGC 7023, Ashraf AbuSara
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Iris Nebula , NGC 7023

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
Iris Nebula , NGC 7023, Ashraf AbuSara
Powered byPixInsight

Iris Nebula , NGC 7023

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Description

My first attempt at NGC 7023. I realized how hard it is to image a reflection nebular from a Bortle 6/7 backyard quickly. To make matters worse 40-50% of the integration time was during a rather bright moon, which is a poor decision on my part. Live and learn. I am still practicing my LRGB workflow and trying to enhance a very dark structure like a reflection nebula from the background was extremely challenging. I hope I can improve my processing to one day give this data justice. 

Please leave a comment if you have any suggestions to improve this image. My processing workflow was:WBPP to stack all images, flats/darks bias. Drizzle x2 with 0.9 pixel shrink was utilized. GraXpert was used to perform background extraction. Done on L/R/G/B frames.Back to pixinsight, using Channel Combination: I combined R/G/B data.Then in that order: SPCC>BlurX>NoiseX>Ez Stretch.On L I did BlurX>NoiseX>Ez StretchI then used LRGB combination to add Luminance to RGB image.StarXterimnator was used to remove stars.Luminance mask was applied to starless imageCurvetransformation applied to add some saturation to image.Stars added back using pixel math.Used HDRMultiscaletransform to bring details out in the bright core.Unmask SharpUsed StarReduction script.

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Iris Nebula , NGC 7023, Ashraf AbuSara