Probably pushing the boundaries of the MPU (Minimum Publishable Unit) here.
We've added 7 hours of 2x2 binned OIII (mapped to a quasi-natural cyan) to our recent 7 hours of unbinned H-alpha.
Full size image here
M17 (mother swan) intrudes brightly into the bottom right corner.
The Cygnet, newly hatched and with scrawny wet feathers, occupying most of the frame, is unmistakeable. A head, turned to our right, showing very swan-like face, eye, upper and lower beak, slightly open. A very long and scruffy neck stretched upward so as to look for mum or enemies. The wing on our left is particularly anatomically accurate, with descending radius, then rising ulna-humerus, then the very long phalanges supporting the feathers. There are even some dark legs dangling down - rather too many legs unfortunately.
The OIII was sufficiently faint to warrant 2x2 binning. It seems to have worked without much loss of resolution, because 2x2 we were only just barely undersampled at 1.1 sec arc/pixel and 1.9 sec arc seeing.
Colourblind Mike struggles with this quasi-natural palette, because it looks monochrome to him. We therefore live in hope of a couple nights of SII and Hubble palette.
Both the Ha and the OIII are stretched and curved exactly the same way (arcsinh curve with slope at origin of 100) so we've not anticipated much problem with cyan rings around the stars, and left them alone. Mike can't see them anyway.
Best,
MnT
