NGC3576 group effort

[Garbz]

One last one from Astrofest and this time something new from me. First time working with narrow band data. First time combining images from different cameras. First time I did an image with someone else. Also my last image from this year's Astrofest.

NGC3576 - Statue of Liberty Nebula.

While I sucked down some 3 hours of RGB with a QHY10, Peter chimed in with some 60min of Ha, 30min of OIII, and 20min of SII taken with his QSI. Both shots were through a Meade ED80. Then unfortunately the night was cut short by fog.

The sharpness was let down a bit by my rig, I have yet to get autofocus and my mount was playing up a bit leading to some light trailing in the RGB data. This turned out not to be too much of a problem for the final image as I blended the Ha into the Luminance and red to get the final image. SII went to Green and OIII went to Blue.

All in all I'm quite happy with it and now somewhat torn. Part of me wants a QSI, and another part is happy that my normal one-short-colour images don't take me 3 days to process like this one did. :lol:

[cometcatcher]

Nice! :thumbsup:

Blimey 3 days... That's a lot of work.

[peter_4059]

Looks good Chris. You've done a good job incorporating the NB data.

[strongmanmike]

Well done, nothing like diving in the deep end, just needed to make it a mozaic and you would have completed the whole list :thumbsup:

Great star colours and a great field of view! The only thing I would note is that the two nebulae should in fact be very different reds - at a much greater distance from us and hence significant interstellar reddening NGC 6303 should be a more orange-deep red and NGC 3576 a more normal magenta, other than that a fine effort :thumbsup:



I also often contemplate getting a one shot to make imaging life so much simpler. Yes a mono and filters has the ultimate advantage in the resolution dept and are good for narrowband but for many if not most objects under average conditions I would imagine the difference would be hard to pick...with practice and some skill one shots and DSLR's make excellent cameras

See:

1) https://www.flickr.com/photos/95375979@N05/with/13633269714/

2) https://www.flickr.com/photos/96882613@N04/with/13934110435/

Just sayin...:thumbsup:

Mike

[Garbz]

Mainly because I hadn't a clue how to process Ha data :)



Your turn, now.



Technical query for you. How would this work when incorporating NB data into the image. You can seen in the RGB that NGC6303 is slightly orange yet it's response looks identical the Ha, OIII, and the one that isn't shown SII. When considering the image is truly more NB than it is real colour, how would different colours even come across? Certainly everything I did I did equally to both nebulas. The problem ultimately comes as soon as I apply Ha to the red channel. I had another image which was Ha+R, G, and B and even that looks like it already clobbered the orange shift of NGC6303.

[RickS]

Looks good, Chris. Only 3 days? That's a bit weak. I spend months on some of them :lol:

[strongmanmike]

Yes using narrow band data in an RGB image to bring out the glory of a nebula and getting it to look like an RGB is indeed very tricky, I have had some great successes (http://www.pbase.com/strongmanmike2002/image/140217701/original) but also some not so great successes, in fact my version of this same pair (http://www.pbase.com/strongmanmike2002/image/142555695/original) taken back in early 2012 is not that crash hot.

You do need some good RGB to get it to work though so it works better on brighter objects.

Mike