NGC6188 (Fighting Dragons of Ara) - SHO

[Gr4h4m]

Taken in July of last year, not long after I picked up my first telescope, this image of NGC6188 (Fighting Dragons of Ara) was captured over the course of several nights and consists of 17.2hrs of integration.

At the time when I first started working on this image I posted the Ha data, however, I never got round to posting the final result.

As things stand this is my first, and only, attempt at capturing a deep sky astrophotography target.

I had planned on spending the rest of 2020 imaging from the backyard, however, work commitments meant I wasn't able to get out even half as much as I wanted to.

GEAR USED

Telescope: William Optics Zenithstar 81
Primary Imaging Camera: XWO ASI183MM Pro
Guide Scope: William Optics 50mm
Guide Camera: ZWO ASI290MM Mini
Mount: Sky-Watcher HEQ5PRO

Astrobin: https://astrob.in/pgh7es/0/

https://astrob.in/pgh7es/0/

[gregbradley]

That's a terrific image. Super sharp. Tiny stars.

Greg.

[petershah]

A beautiful shot of a wonderful target:thumbsup:

[multiweb]

The data and the field look good but it's a little noisy and the high res is showing a lot of sharpening artefacts. Shame because there seems to be a lot of details to dig out of the data. Maybe due for a repro. What software did you use to process?

[Gr4h4m]

Yeah, I’ll admit, with this being my first attempt I’d never used PixInsight before so there’s still a lot of trial and error going on.

I stacked the images using Deep Sky Stacker, made some adjustments in PixInsight and then finished it off in Adobe Photoshop.

I’ll probably reprocess it once I’ve managed to get my head around some of the other tools in PI.

Cheers

[multiweb]

You could stack in PI instead. I reckon you'll get a better result. If you still get a noisy master after sharpening try Startools (https://www.startools.org/). It has a great deconvolution routine and noise reduction. Then tweak your colors to taste in PS. I think you can get a fantastic result because you have a good field, colors and image scale already so it's just processing from here on.

[AdamJL]

Stunning!!