Trifid Collaboration - Sydney Narrowband & Byron Bay Colour :D

[dylan_odonnell]

John Mills and I planned ahead of time to capture the Trifid Nebula (M20) with roughly the same field of view configuration and framing/rotation so that we could combine our data later. John took the Hydrogen Alpha from his backyard in Sydney (total 1.6 hours) and I took the colour data from mine in Byron Bay (total 1.5 hours). PixInsight helped align and process the stacks separately which were merged in Photoshop. I'm really quite happy with how it turned out! I was shooting with Celestron 9.25" Edge HD / F6.3 reducer / QHY12 Colour CCD and John was shooting with William Optics 110T / +Atik Cameras One Mono w/ Astronomik Ha filter.

Higher Resolution : http://deography.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Trifid-John-and-Dylan-Collab.jpg

I've been playing around a fair bit lately with this "LRGB" method combining a mono camera's Ha data with a colour camera's one-shot RGB data. It's a pretty quick and dirty way to get an image done in true colour without have to do every R G B channel as a separate image run. And if you don't have 2 cameras with similar chip sizes you can always ask a friend and join forces like we did here :)

[billdan]

Congratulations Dylan and John, the Trifid looks really good with the surrounding dust clouds. Some of the stars look like they have a hard edge, but that may be caused by Ha stars mixed with OSC stars.

Cheers
Bill

[strongmanmike]

Very cool project guys, well done and the resulting image looks pretty good too :thumbsup:

Should probably be more of this...Rick has the right idea, being in cahoots with some other imagers with a great scope at a good dark site, take it in turns...jealous...hate Rick... :mad2:

Mike
ps Naaah Wuv you Wick :love2:

[Atmos]

You've done well on capturing the dust in the region, nice job on the collaboration too :)

[dylan_odonnell]

Thanks guys! That's right Bill the hard edge / halo is definitely a result of this technique and probably something I can address with more work in the star masking / reduction stage to ensure they are of similar size. The image has some other issues as there are only 10 frames of Ha and a couple of wobbly ones that egged the stars but I'm thrilled with the potential of this process so we've got some other targets lined up for collaboration and I have 2 CCDs (mono + colour) to try also if the weather gives me a break :)

d

[RickS]

It's a great idea, Dylan. Look forward to you refining the process and fixing the minor nits.



Wuv you too, big guy :lol:

[multiweb]

Looks like a painting a la Rogelio. Interesting take on this. Cool shot. :thumbsup: