IC 1396A / Elephant's Trunk Nebula
Just over a year on and I've taken another attempt at the subject of my
first Astrobin image to see how I've improved in the past twelve months or so. If nothing else, not trying to do 5 minute subs on an overloaded star tracker is a good start! This also marks a return to Narrowband imaging after a number of months focusing on galaxies, it's nice to not have to fight light pollution (as much) again!
For this image I've tried two different edits, the first and the one I'm leading with is a Bi-Colour version based on the dynamic narrowband combinations found on
The Coldest Nights website. The second (Revision B) is another attempt at SHO processing as I'm in desperate need of the practice, and have never been too happy with my results - which seem to vary wildly!
In the middle of capturing the data for this image I finally caved and picked up a
Starizona Nexus, bringing my 200PDS down from 1000mm f/5.0 to 750mm f/3.75. The improvement in SNR on individual subs is dramatic as one might expect, and given I was previously oversampling my seeing the loss of real resolution is negligible. The downside however is that I am now much more sensitive to collimation and tilt, but so far it's been manageable between BlurXTerminator and a small crop in the worst cases.
I threw together a quick and dirty mosaic with my older image to show the difference in field of view:
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