What fascinates me more...

[LewisM]

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE emission nebulae, reflection nebulae etc, but what really excites me - oddly - is planetary nebulae. Probably because some are hard to find, because of their science, or because of their look - or all of the above. Just something I LOVE about them.

Anyways, last night was a CORKER of a night here in QLD (and darned chilly- had to crack out the over-coat, and remember to buy some dew strips!), and I did a GOOD series of runs now I have APT all set, and everything ready to guide when the guide package finally arrives tomorrow.

This is NGC 7009. Not a hard target, but a fascinating one. 29 lights (1 rejected by DSS oddly), 6 each darks, flats and bias. Cleaned up some in StarTools (I cannot praise StarTools enough!). Cropped and voila!

I decided to TRY to show the core of the PN, which I feel it has done mostly. Most images of 7009 show the typicl blue "Saturn" image.

Criticism welcome!

Processing some HARD target FAINT PN's now

[Larryp (Laurie)]

Nice image, Lewis!

[RickS (Rick)]

It's a tricky one, Lewis. You've done well!

I did some test shots of that PN a few weeks ago. The moon was up so I needed a bright target. I started processing and the image was looking quite good with a reasonable amount of internal detail. I got to the end of my usual workflow and did a conversion to sRGB and the PN just turned to blurry mush. All the detail was in colours that were out of gamut for sRGB Must get back to it and try again. Maybe I'll start in sRGB next time.

Cheers,
Rick.

[LewisM]

Trying NGC 246 in Cetus now... frustrating... cannot get balance or much colour (I know it is quite white anyway).

May have found something interesting that does not seem to be on any charts...