M8 Lagoon from LMDSS in Vic

[John K]

Another image from last weekend at the ASV's LMDSS site.

M8 taken over 6 hours in LRGB. All images stacked were 180 seconds long. AP900 mount; CDK 9.5" f/7; ASI1600mm camera.

Could spend days processing M8 as the data was very good and I am fascinated by this object. Would like to try a far sharper version to see more detail in the nebular.

A higher res version image is here:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/johnkazanas/48248202927/in/dateposted-public/lightbox/

Clear skies.

John K.

[Placidus]

Hi, John,

The image seems very soft, and the brighter stars bloated, compared with your recent magnificent Omega Centauri, where the stars were very sharp and resolved down to the core.

You mentioned that the underlying data seemed good. Perhaps you could reprocess being careful not to clip the brighter stars to white, deconvolve, and use a star mask to protect them while you wavelet sharpen the background ?

The depth is looking good already, so you can be very spartan with the noise reduction.

Best,
MnT

[Atmos]

Details look quite sharp John but I would suggest that the colour needs a little tweaking.
I took the same FOV and resolution two weeks ago can ended up with a near identical colour in the Lagoon. I tried using some Hubble data of the Hourglass region and ours is a bit red biased and found I had to increase the blue for some of the bluer whisps to slow up around the central region.

[John K]

Thanks Colin - getting the blue wisps out on this object I have found challenging.

In any case, here is a re-processed version, still not a sharp as I would like, so perhaps I would need to Ha data to overlay.

High Res here:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/johnkazanas/48409305006/in/dateposted-public/lightbox/

[Atmos]

It is looking more contrasty now :thumbsup:

[codemonkey]

Solid effort John :-)

As Colin points out, it is quite red. My data looked very similar when I used PhotometricColorCalibration in PixInsight as I have been lately. That may indicate that it's more technically correct, but I prefer to have less monochromatic looking images.

I ended up just finding a dark spot and using BackgroundNeutralization on my data... that gave me more range in colour, but was too blue... I bumped the red and dropped the blue a bit from there... might still be too blue, I dunno. Nebulae are hard :p