[Placidus (Mike and Trish)]

Originally Posted by Shiraz

processing has resulted in a beautiful delicate image - really nice work on what is obviously a hard target

Thanks, Ray. Glad you like it.

Originally Posted by ghsmith45

Very nice M&T. Just to see what was going on I split your image into R->SII, G->H-alpha and B->OIII. I find that Ha is the strongest, there is a distinct OIII ring and an amorphous mass of SII, which, at first glance is on a par with the OIII in brightness. However, I took some brightness samples and found that, on a scale of 0->1 some of the silicon was around the 0.5 mark, while none of the OIII made it past 0.4, so the SIII is definitely brighter than the OIII. Some of the Ha got up to 0.7. (Bear in mind that this is for a stretched image).

Geoff

Hi, Geoff,

Thanks for having a good close look and making some useful observations. That's it exactly: a big bright green H-alpha clam-shell, a small round blue OIII inner ring, and diffuse red clouds of SII top and bottom.

I re-read what I originally wrote and realized that although I said "Hubble Palette", and "Blue OIII ring", I didn't actually spell out the mapping, so in light of both your and Mike S's comments, I've edited the original post.

Your measurements would (correctly) suggest that we could stretch the image more, but the trouble is that the stars just blow out and nothing gets any clearer.

We'd like to collect hugely more OIII data, perhaps unbinned, in the hope that it will be less gritty and that will help guide the eye, but of course it will also make the stars even brighter still. Fingers crossed. Again, thanks for looking.

Best,
Mike