I have imaged this area before which also included NGC6164, but I was never really enamoured by the final finish of the image or its composition.
It is an often imaged region and I doubt that I am presenting anything new. I prefer this palette to my original effort though.
For those interested I did a Hubble palette on the narrow band data and then did a lighten layer mask to the RGB to give a more natural colour look. This object can tend to look quite green due to the gas composition, which is not one of my favoured cast colours to NB imaging.
There are some interesting knots of gas and dust and a rather interesting blue shell surrounding the OB star in the centre. It is really there as I have seen vague hints of it in others images.
The large star left of centre has a blue halo around it, deconvolution artifact?
Over all the image looks heavily processed with a lot of unsharpmasking and looks too dark?
Not a fan of this one Paul.
No the blue halo is a real halo around that star. Not an optical artefact.
Certainly not heavily processed but does have a high contrast appearance. I don't use unsharp masking at all. In fact I don't do broad brush processing like many here do.
Ok not to be a fan. I am still seeing how it fits with me too.
Quote:
Originally Posted by LewisM
I was going to say what Bart said.
Colour looks weird to me Paul, sorry. Stars look like I processed them (blocky).
Repro man, repro - I know it's in you
You need to wait for the image to down load correctly Lewis. It is a big image around 3mb and the stars will look blocky to start with.
Stars look nice and round in the large image at 200% from edge to edge.
There's great detail in the nebulous area's I can appreciate what Paul is trying to do with the mix.
Thanks guys, I appreciate the support but Gray has rightly pointed out that I went a bit over board on contrast and sharpening. Not a lot, but enough to bother me too. I was looking at it on my ipad and was not happy with it on that. I used several monitors to determine what looks best. So it is a legitimate critique.
I have done a mild reprocess with less sharpening and curves for contrasting. I think it fits better but it might not suit others and that is ok to say so.
Looks great on my monitor without my glasses! I put my glasses on and... it looks even better! Wonderful image. Yes it's contrasty but in a good way. A really good narrow band / RGB mix.
Detail is good and the stars look like typical KAF-8300 stars with the microlens spikes (people keep accusing me of adding them!) I'm not a huge fan of the colours. I gave it overnight to see if they grew on me but they didn't. Just personal taste, of course... Good on you for trying something a little different.
Paul, I think it's a superb, interesting interpretation of this area. Trish and I spent a lot of time comparing your shot with ours, and we could see that you've brought out faint OIII nebulosity which is there in the sky but we'd lost in processing.
I agree with you completely that the big bright cluster near centre has a genuine blue OIII bubble emission ring around it, and if one looks very closely, there are several other even bigger but fainter OIII bubbles in the image. These are unquestionably caused by stellar winds from very bright stars that may have finished their lives by now.
Folks: Stars at this distance are tiny unresolvable points, with no discernible diameter at all. It's not the dark ring that that's the artifact, it's the whole thing, especially the Airy Disc, the thing that we all normally so proudly show. It is sensible to permit some ringing around stars in order to improve legitimate sharpness in the nebulosity, which is the point of the photo.
Well, I looked at it on my laptop just now (was on the wife's Acer last night - should say enough!), and I agree the stars are VERY good. And the "spikes" surely are KAF microlenses as Rick suggests - I noticed it with my 8300 too on brighter stars.
(blocky).
