Ze Prawn Nebula - also known as IC 4628 is an emission nebula located in the Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way, around 6,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Scorpius.
S,H, and O blended with some PIP functions for a 'sort of' natural palette Synthetic Lum from Sii and Ha.
re the star shapes - must concede that did require a touch of work. triplet and the little 4/3 sensor help alot, and the eq6 giving me really good guiding numbers (from memory this set averaged 0.5-0.7" error) did most of the work, but a low cost 7nm Oiii filter in a bortle 6 did leave a noticeable difference to the size of the Ha stars.
Futsed around for about an hour trying to reduce the Oii stars with unsatisfactory results. Ended up just pulling out the Ha stars, blowing them up to match the Oiii star sizes and then combining.
this took care of a little bit of the soft edges on the larger, brighter Oiii stars, though I'm sure a few have noticed there is still a slightly blue 'aura' left in some the of the larger stars. The CBD is also south of my location so any target around SCP does result in a fair bit of background glow in the Oiii. I'm using this as justification to stick my hand in my pocket for a 3nm Oiii filter
anyway, thanks again for the very kind comments. all this rain the last 6 months did leave me with much more time to learn and play with processing techniques, so silver lining? also take much inspiration from some of the works already posted here, so thanks for that as well!
re the star shapes - must concede that did require a touch of work. triplet and the little 4/3 sensor help alot, and the eq6 giving me really good guiding numbers (from memory this set averaged 0.5-0.7" error) did most of the work, but a low cost 7nm Oiii filter in a bortle 6 did leave a noticeable difference to the size of the Ha stars.
Futsed around for about an hour trying to reduce the Oii stars with unsatisfactory results. Ended up just pulling out the Ha stars, blowing them up to match the Oiii star sizes and then combining.
this took care of a little bit of the soft edges on the larger, brighter Oiii stars, though I'm sure a few have noticed there is still a slightly blue 'aura' left in some the of the larger stars. The CBD is also south of my location so any target around SCP does result in a fair bit of background glow in the Oiii. I'm using this as justification to stick my hand in my pocket for a 3nm Oiii filter
anyway, thanks again for the very kind comments. all this rain the last 6 months did leave me with much more time to learn and play with processing techniques, so silver lining? also take much inspiration from some of the works already posted here, so thanks for that as well!
Churs
Addos
I dont understand why you futsed with the stars. OIII stars are always bigger than Ha in NB (even with 3nm OIII), and anyway star colour is irrelevant in NB. Why didnt you just go with Ha stars only (as white) given they are smaller?. If you want proper star colour then do some short RGB exposures, extract the stars and insert, either as is, or as a colour channel for the Ha stars as lum.