Here is NGC2080 Ghost head nebula in colour mapped narrowband (I dont get the ghost head part at all ).
Its a straight SII:Ha:OIII mapped as RGB with too many seperate RGB stars inserted, for those that just must have them in everything . The seperate filter images were so different, I couldnt use Ha as lum. Yes I know blending options are possible, I just thought id go with RGB given the poor data.
I cant find anywhere on the web anything even remotely close to this FOV, I have no idea why. The images I can find look totally different and all seem to be from the same source.
It was very dim, hence the lack of detail, no sharpening at all. This effort has been a hard lesson. I took some 8hrs of Ha bin1 and 5hrs of SII, OIII bin2 and found the Ha bin1 had no detail advantage at all, was a waste of time, wouldve had better signal with Ha bin2 with no loss of res at this FL (2250mm).
The image scale at bin1 is 0.62 arc/secs (6.80 um pixels) and at bin2 1.25 arc/secs. Bin 1 is a complete waste of time with 3 arc/sec seeing unless you have very clean signal that can stand huge amounts of deconvolute and sharpenning.
I will from now on do bin2 all up for the dim stuff, untill I get a 17" .
I could make some flippant derogatory remark and follow it with a and a but I will attempt to curb this tide .....
Looks very interesting Fred, a crazy challenge for sure but you have produced a colourful ghostly looking image, nice.
Hope you don't mind Fred but for those not familiar with this bit of nebula, it is near the Tarantula Nebula - the top left area of nebulosity in this image with a more familiar framing
Nice effort and, like seeker372011 I'm always very happy to see something I haven't seen before.
I gotta agree with you though that the image resolution, is indeed too large for the amount of detailed contained (a high pass filter yielded nothing but the stars, which says it all). Still, lovely to look at when you resize it to 1/3!
The image is already nice and noise free, and I know I haven't been able to sell it to you in the past, but since the deed is done and you got nothing to lose, how about software binning your data and using that extra data to pump up your levels?
Regardless, always a pleasure seeing your work - like this image, it's usually more 'out there' than what's otherwise on offer.
Thanks Ivo. Im still poking around with doubling sub size before combine (lots of RAM!), doubling before decon, and in PS before sharpening. Even times 4 makes a big difference, but again needs much RAM with mutiple layers and masks. Software binning is on the list, but im wary and havent tried it yet.
Thanks Greg. This would be an absolute cracker with your 17" !. Theres a lot more stringy dust lane detail there that was buried in noise in my subs.
).
. The seperate filter images were so different, I couldnt use Ha as lum. Yes I know blending options are possible, I just thought id go with RGB given the poor data.
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but I will attempt to curb this tide 
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