Thread: Helix HNO
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Old 02-09-2018, 03:51 PM
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Slawomir (Suavi)
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Join Date: Sep 2014
Location: North Queensland
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Helix HNO

Hi all,

First of all, thank you all for your feedback and encouragement with this project. I did not plan to do any unusually long for me integration, but as the project went on I wanted to see how my camera and telescope behave with longer total exposure. It has proven to be quite a tough object to process. I am not quite pleased with the final result, but having gone through literally tens of revisions I think I need a longer break and may try a different colour approach one day in the future.

Some acquisition details:

Telescope: CFF 105mm with a Riccardi reducer (imaging at f/4.5)
Camera: QSI 690
Filters: 3nm Ha (201 x 900s), 3nm OIII (124 x 900s) and 3nm NII (88 x 900s).

Although processing still have plenty of room for improvement, I tried to respect each and every photon by not doing decon, not removing stars and by applying only a touch of noise reduction. I combined Ha, OIII and NII into a Luminance - it resulted in an improved overall NSR (background noise is only 0.17e!) at the expense of washing out some interesting structures near the core due to strong signal in OIII and perhaps making outer bows and shockwaves a tad fainter.

Links to Astrobin:

V1 - Conservative processing: https://www.astrobin.com/full/364378/B/?nc=user

V2 - A bit more adventurous processing: https://www.astrobin.com/full/364378/C/?nc=user

V3 - Darkened background: https://www.astrobin.com/full/364378/D/?nc=user

V4 - More colour: https://www.astrobin.com/full/364378/E/?nc=user

V5 - More noise reduction: https://www.astrobin.com/full/364378/F/?nc=user

V6 - Final result: https://www.astrobin.com/full/364378/G/

Thank you for looking
Suavi
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Last edited by Slawomir; 07-09-2018 at 04:37 PM.
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