The Many Faces of Narrowband

[furgle (Adam)]

I was amusing myself by playing around with narrowband palettes last night due to a long run of cloudy weather. I thought it would be interesting to post how different a planetary nebula can look based on the channel combinations.

This is planetary nebula PK 303+40.1 / Sh2-313, and being so dim, it was a pain in the ass to image.

Full resolution here

Original processed image here

[Andy01 (Andy)]

Pretty cool there Furgle, your take on a Warhol perhaps? Lol

[Atmos (Colin)]

That's pretty cool Adam, my favourite colour wise is the middle right

[furgle (Adam)]

Originally Posted by Atmos

That's pretty cool Adam, my favourite colour wise is the middle right

That's the one I ended up choosing. Similar to the helix nebula.

[DaveNZ (Dave)]

Very cool Adam. I've spent ages looking at your combinations

[furgle (Adam)]

I'm sure there are a heap of other nice combinations I am yet to learn about. I read about a H H*O O palette yesterday and it made a nice red outer & blue inner image.

I saw some nice gold & white narrowband images once but can't find them anywhere or work out how to get anything like it with pixel math.

[codemonkey (Lee)]

Nice comparison, Adam. I prefer all the blends in the bottom row, they look more natural to my eyes.

You say in the bottom right image that you mapped Ha to orange and OIII to cyan. What software were you using for this and how did you do that mapping?

[furgle (Adam)]

They were all done in Photoshop using Hue/Saturation in colorize mode, then screening the layers together. For the pixel math images, transparency was used to combine multiple layers into RGB channels.