This one has been a lot of work, 16 hours of Oiii in 600 second subs, 15.3 hours of HA, a couple of hours each of LRGB and endless hours of processing and reprocessing. My aim was to produce a nice HA-Oiii bicolour helix overlaid on RGB stars, but more important, with as many of the background galaxies as I could manage retained in the RGB.
After a lot of goes over and some discussion with Andy01 and others about colours, I was finally happy enough to pull the trigger on sending this out in to the world. It was either that or keep reprocessing it for another week.
Astrobin link here just don't go pixel peeping too deep hey?
Excellent!. Its very deep!, worth the exposure time and effort in processing IMO. Exposure time is the last mile for this object, to make a difference and stand out from the ordinary, the need to capture that extended nebula, you have nailed that !. The colour processing is appropriate too. A pleasure to view!.
Thanks, it is certainly my high water mark in terms of integration time on a single panel. I was aiming for significantly more but the weather just would not play the game! I have been shooting it so long this year to get enough good nights that I started out having to wait for it to rise high enough!
I did nearly get the colours wrong, I started out using the normal greenish "Teal" that is often used for Oiii added to an RGB image, and the core came out sort of an emerald green!
Paul,
Cracker of an image with astonishing depth and detail
One of the best Helix I’ve come across in years , colours are perfect and Star field is exceptional
Cant help but praise the new generation ZWO 2600 cooled cameras ( both Mono and Colour )
Well done indeed !!
Martin
I really wanted more LRGB data but the weather has just been dire imaging wise! I had gotten to the point where I really could not see much difference in the HA and Oiii after adding a last lot of subs. The last two nights if data gathering I was shooting LRGB until moonrise then changing to either HA or Oiii for the remainder of the night.
What I was really happy with was getting the guiding really nailed down on my CEM70 mount, "Normal" guiding was around 0.6" RMS (So about the same as the pixel scale) and a few times on still nights I saw periods in the 0.2X" range! Apart from a few nights where clouds interfered, I tossed out very few subs! On the last night of combined LRGB-Oiii I kept all subs bar the very last Oiii which was impacted by some high cloud!
Last edited by The_bluester; 30-09-2021 at 08:52 PM.
Thanks Mike, I was just looking back over all my data, 15 nights of shooting!
The worst night I set up in hope the weather would clear and at midnight deleted what I had and packed it up, the next worst night I got two useful subs between the clouds in the whole night (I left it going and trusted to Voyager to look after the gear, which it did. it gave up and parked it at about 1AM) The very best night yielded 44 X 10 minute HA subs!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ryderscope
You've certainly captured some complex detail in the outer shells there Paul.
I will be honest, I had no idea what I was going to find, I could bring out more of the very faint outer HA stuff but it really messed with the final images balance so I pulled back a little.
Well done! - Seems that nabbing a decent deep Helix seems to have become a sort of AP rite of passage
Theres a little bit of noise in the outer shells but having seen ultra deep versions here from Suavi & Paul Haese, it would likely take another 20-30 hrs to reduce that further.
Box ticked, what's your next target to be?
Well, unless the sky suddenly clears so I can nab four or five more nights of HA and OIII I guess I should move on!
As to what is next, I am suffering from analysis paralysis at the moment with so many potential targets to chose from. I am thinking of finding something with a lot of dark and dusty stuff in it to chase. I need to get my finger out and press the SVX80 back in to service. I have been too busy recently to even think of tending two rigs at once so it has not come out for a couple of months. I really need that ROR shed so I can leave them set up.
