nGC 2736, the Pencil Nebula

[alpal]

Originally Posted by ghsmith45

Thanks Allan. Go ahead and post. Nice to see what someone else makes of it. I actually didn't go all out with this one because my first processing attempt two years ago was a real bummer, so when I did a quick repro and got a much better result I stopped there. Now that I've got so many positive comments I'll have a more careful go at it.

Hi Geoff,
OK - a slight re-process:
https://www.astrobin.com/full/135667/0/

Is that a touch better?

cheers
Allan

[Geoff45 (Geoff)]

Originally Posted by alpal

Hi Geoff,
OK - a slight re-process:
https://www.astrobin.com/full/135667/0/

Is that a touch better?

cheers
Allan

Thanks Allan. Yes, the colours are much deeper without being overblown. I like the darker background too. Another repro is in order here.
Geoff

[alpal]

Originally Posted by ghsmith45

Thanks Allan. Yes, the colours are much deeper without being overblown. I like the darker background too. Another repro is in order here.
Geoff

Thanks Geoff,
The hardest part was the star mask:
Only Deep Sky Stacker could do it well enough & I had
to divide the picture by 3 then make the mask on maximum star size settings
& then multiply the mask by 3 to use it later.
Even then the 2 biggest stars had to be masked manually.
Controlling those stars will be easier for you with the original data.
The rest was easy.

cheers
Allan

[gregbradley]

Nice image Geoff. Your original looks best as the repro has badly blown out stars with blue halos.

Yeah it would be nice to get those stars more under control - perhaps shorter subexposure times may've helped at acquisition stage.

The pencil neb though I thought was blue/red rather than teal/red.

Greg.

[Geoff45 (Geoff)]

Originally Posted by gregbradley

Nice image Geoff. Your original looks best as the repro has badly blown out stars with blue halos.

Thanks Greg. Allan's repro was from a jpeg, so problems were inevtable.

Yeah it would be nice to get those stars more under control - perhaps shorter subexposure times may've helped at acquisition stage.

I think I can knock them down a bit when I do the repro

The pencil neb though I thought was blue/red rather than teal/red.

Greg.

I'm not sure one way or the other. Have to check it out. I like the teal though.

[RickS (Rick)]

Originally Posted by gregbradley

The pencil neb though I thought was blue/red rather than teal/red.

There's a lot of OIII in narrowband images of the area so I think teal is probably accurate.

[alpal]

Originally Posted by gregbradley

Nice image Geoff. Your original looks best as the repro has badly blown out stars with blue halos.

Yeah it would be nice to get those stars more under control - perhaps shorter subexposure times may've helped at acquisition stage.

The pencil neb though I thought was blue/red rather than teal/red.

Greg.

Hi Greg,
" badly blown out stars with blue halos. "

The stars are a lot softer in my repro.
The halos could be easily reduced by blurring but I thought they looked more natural as is.
There are many targets - one example is Thors Helmet where bright stars
can overpower a faint nebula.
In Photoshop you have to use fill & content aware to reduce them
as I did - then blend with opacity -
& it's very difficult - even if you have shorter exposures to work with & to then blend them back in.
These faint nebulas are tricky to process.


cheers
Allan