NGC6334 Cats Paw Nebula

[Doogs38]

Hi folks. I haven't had the opportunity for astro these past few months but did enjoy shooting the Cats Paw Nebula last week during some lovely, clear winter skies (in SEQLD) albeit with a bright moon.

The attached image is 10h 20 mins of SHO data. Details are:

Edge HD 8", ASI294MM (Bin 2), OAG with ASI174, AZ-EQ6 mount, NINA
Sii - 4h 4m
Ha - 3h 40m
Oiii - 2h 36m
RGB stars

Sharing for fun. Thanks for looking. Alex

[RodW]

Nice image Alex, I like it. I've spent most of today trying to process the same target and cannot get any blue to show up. I've used a 2600MM and narrowband subs only.

Interested to know your method for generating a colour result.

[John W]

Really nice image Alex - and a lot of time spent taking it. Much better than the beginners section.
John W.

[carlstronomy]

Stunning image, great detail in there. Certainly worth the effort and the processing is good.

:thumbsup:

[Doogs38]

Hi Rod, John and Carl. Apologies for not responding sooner but I hadn't anticipated anyone taking the time to comment, so I haven't looked here for a while. Thank you for your kind comments :)

Rod, this one was a bit tricky for me (...as they all are lol) and much of it is trial and error and not as reproducible as I'd like. Did you end up finding a workflow that worked?

For me, the Sii was important to use as it helped produced some of the lovely detail in the upper right 'lobe'. However, it also made the SHO image very suphury yellow, but with decent Oiii showing through. I enhanced the Oiii colour using the 'SelectiveColourCorrection' script that comes with the script package from here: https://www.ideviceapps.de/PixInsight/Utilities/. To tone down the yellow and get more red (Ha) I gently blended a small amount of HOO with the enhanced SHO image, tweaked the blended image with the 'NarrowbandNormalisation' process to enhance the colours, all the while using the curves and histogram tools to keep contrast, saturation etc balanced and to avoid things looking too hollywood. IIRC I combined the final image with a faux luminance to help make the detail, contrast, colours etc pop a little more. It might not be a documentary-type image but I was happy with the end result and it looked quite similar to many of the images on Astrobin. Hope that helps a little bit. Alex