Thor and a very brief M78

[Benjamin (Ben)]

It’s been a long 5 months of almost nothing for me (constant clouds and poorly timed gigs) but did manage a couple of hours under some dark skies on M78 and reprocessed an old Thor’s Helmet. Hoping March works….

When processing M78 I seemed to erroneously get a lot of colour around M78 (much more than I expected anyway), which could well have been the conditions, which, while in a Bortle 2 location, we’re affected by a nearby fire and passing cloud. Might also have be something in processing? Dynamic Background Extraction? Colour balancing?

M78
Scope: Skywatcher Esprit 100
Mount: EQ6-R
Camera: ZWO ASI533MC
Filter: Optolong UV/IR Cut filter
Exposures: 100x60s, and 16x120s totaling around 2 hours
Astrobin: https://www.astrobin.com/full/3wle8b/H/

NGC 2359 (Thor’s Helmet)
Scope: Skywatcher Quattro 8” f4 Newtonian
Mount: EQ6-R
Camera: ZWO ASI1600MM-Pro
Filters: Astrodon Ha 5nm and OIII 3nm, RGB
Exposures: Ha 57x180s, OIII 51x180s
Astrobin: https://www.astrobin.com/full/4891y7/H/

[LKD (Luke)]

very nice work

[Kuz]

2 beautiful images Ben . Colours in Thors helmet look awesome

[Benjamin (Ben)]

Originally Posted by LKD

very nice work

Cheers LKD.

Originally Posted by Kuz

2 beautiful images Ben . Colours in Thors helmet look awesome

Thanks Kuz. A little shifted from the usual OIII teal but preserves the red/blue relationships.

Updated M78 with some much more careful background extraction. A big difference in regard to maintaining the red area (here above the brighter cores). All quite noisy still but guess its what you'd expect after 2 hours. Used Paul's incredible image as a reference for the colour.

https://www.astrobin.com/full/3wle8b/J/

[gregbradley]

Great work. Hard to imagine that M78 was taken with only 100mm of aperture.

Greg.

[Benjamin (Ben)]

Originally Posted by gregbradley

Great work. Hard to imagine that M78 was taken with only 100mm of aperture.

Cheers Greg. I had nice dark skies for the most part I think. I have been experimenting using Topaz denoise on a starless version before adding back in the stars, which helps sharpen things, although easy to overcook it too. Realize I had created some stupid colour artifacts using a different process however (trying to remove some a bright magenta halo around the brightest star which affected other bits of the image). Now fixed here, although still the usual noise from the short integration: https://www.astrobin.com/full/3wle8b/K/

[multiweb (Marc)]

That's excellent. Beautiful rendition.

[Benjamin (Ben)]

Originally Posted by multiweb

That's excellent. Beautiful rendition.

Thanks Marc. Still much to learn with OSC cameras and processing that data, so glad to have made a start :-)

[gregbradley]

Originally Posted by Benjamin

Cheers Greg. I had nice dark skies for the most part I think. I have been experimenting using Topaz denoise on a starless version before adding back in the stars, which helps sharpen things, although easy to overcook it too. Realize I had created some stupid colour artifacts using a different process however (trying to remove some a bright magenta halo around the brightest star which affected other bits of the image). Now fixed here, although still the usual noise from the short integration: https://www.astrobin.com/full/3wle8b/K/

The bottom part of the neb now has a burnt out central area which it didn't in the original image. It should come back with detail using Photoshop's Shadows and Highlights tool

Greg.

[Benjamin (Ben)]

Originally Posted by gregbradley

The bottom part of the neb now has a burnt out central area which it didn't in the original image. It should come back with detail using Photoshop's Shadows and Highlights tool

Greg.

Ah yeah! Should be easy enough to recover, although I’ll use a PixInsight tool (don’t own photoshop). Thanks so much for the thoughtful comment and taking time to compare the images.

[Benjamin (Ben)]

Here you go Greg. The core is not as blown out and a little more colourful. As I reduced the intensity of the whites it also made me realise the stars were a bit odd, thanks to starnet, so these are a little less noisy/blockish now too.

https://www.astrobin.com/full/3wle8b/M/

[Andy01 (Andy)]

Hey Ben, Nice to see you back imaging again!

There's something NQR about that Thor image though - the fine details look kind of smeary.

There should be a lot more detail visible imaging with your gear - a problem with smoke haze maybe?
Love the vibrant colour palette though!

[Benjamin (Ben)]

Originally Posted by Andy01

Hey Ben, Nice to see you back imaging again!

There's something NQR about that Thor image though - the fine details look kind of smeary.

There should be a lot more detail visible imaging with your gear - a problem with smoke haze maybe?
Love the vibrant colour palette though!

Could well have been hazy, but was rather a long time ago. I was trying out a new way of processing it (using starnet and Topaz denoise) so might have not got that quite right. Worked in keeping my dodgy stars from going off the rails and smoothing out the nebula but perhaps smoothed things too much perhaps. Nothing like having another crack at it!