Cats Paw Nebula

[furgle]

Image:



72x 600s Sulphur-II 6nm
97x 600s Hydrogen-alpha 6nm
73x 600s Oxygen-III 6nm

Total integration 40 hours 20 minutes.
Hardware:



Skywatcher Black Diamond 80ED
Skywatcher EQ8 Pro mount
QSI 683-ws8 Camera @ -15°C
Astronomik 6nm Hα, OIII, SII filters
Starlight Xpress Lodestar X2 Autoguider
Innovations Foresight On Axis Guider
Starlight Instruments Focus Boss II

Location:



Orange zone in Brisbane, Australia. (Bortle 7)
Imaged over 8 nights.

Software:



Planning & camera alignment with Aladin 10
Captured with TheSkyX Professional
Guiding with PHD2
FocusLock live focusing
PixInsight: Calibration, sub-frame analysis, registration, integration, dynamic background extraction, noise reduction, histogram transformation, HDR multiscale transform, curves, star reduction, rotation, crop.

Higher resolution here: http://observatory.site/astrophotography/Cats_Paw_Nebula/

[Andy01]

40+ hrs? Wow, Herculean effort- looks great on my phone, well done! :thumbsup:
[/LIST]

[SimmoW]

Very nice and yes a huge effort! Nice colours.

For 40hrs, I would have expected a smoother result. Maybe it's been sharpened too much?

[Placidus]

Hi, Adam,

Looks like you've got some joyously good data there.

I feel that it's over-processed. The background is too pushed, causing the main target to become weak and posterized. Perhaps the HDR step is the main culprit, but also too strong a curve. It's also too saturated, again tending to produce posterization. Narrowband images don't normally need the saturation to be touched at all.

If you do push the background less, the main subject will seem more contrasty and you won't need to sharpen it so much.

I'd strongly recommend you have another go using a more gentle touch, not trying to bring out the background so much, but aiming to let the main subject speak for itself, because the underlying data look really tops. Very nicely acquired.

Hope I'm being useful rather than obnoxious.

Very best,
Mike

[Atmos]

40 hours is a super effort!
It looks quite good but I do tend to agree with Mike. Very nice and clean data to play with :)

[furgle]

Thanks guys. I always appreciate the feedback. I just realised pixinsight has not been using my darks, so that may be some of the problem with noise. I wrote some software to interface all my systems together and it writes the fits header, so now I need to work out which keywords are causing the issue.

I'm going to have another go at this data. Hopefully a better result the next time round.

[Placidus]

An astrophotographer after my own heart !

Mike