NGC 6820 and 6823

[Addos (Adam)]

Primum iter a septentrione ad aequinoctium caeleste!

First image from the new house which has the nice feature of visibility of targets north of the equator! West is a little obscured so less time on target per night. Also a low bortle 5, pretty chuffed about that too!

This was the first target I could find in that mysterious northern region on my first clear night.

This is also the first image that I substantially switched out my post process into Affinity. Blending / compositing options really do give you so much more flexibility and I really enjoyed playing with colour and luminosity balancing with this one.

SHO w/ RGB stars, 28hrs NB, 45 mins RGB
Esprit 120 / Eq6r / 2600mm / Antlia filters

Higher res here: https://www.astrobin.com/11jp2w/

[FrancoRodriguez (Franco)]

Beautiful image mate! Love the colours and composition

[Dave882 (David)]

Great work on this one! I collected a bunch of data on this earlier in the year but never was satisfied with it. Now I’ve got something to aim for… great stuff

[Addos (Adam)]

Cheers Franco! I usually adjust all greens out of my finals but the little bits in this one I kinda liked, shows the gradual shift in intensity between the Oiii and Sii in the core


Mr Dave, thank you kind sir and hope you've been well! Yep the Oiii signal is pretty weak in this one and just Ha and Sii, even if you get good SNR leaves you with some funky / flat colour combinations. I was certainly not impressed with the Foraxx combo I did in Pix. This is why I was quite excited to get the $60 affinity photo deal recently - you definitely get a lot more flexibility to tweak levels / curves and play with different compositing modes and being able to target and adjust specific colours without messing around with masks!


That said, if I wasnt happy with the affinity colours I think this is a decent target just to layer your Ha over the RGB and get a bit of a 'super-RGB' image?

[Startrek (Martin)]

Adam,
Stunning image with well defined pillars in the core region
Colour is spot on too
Great effort to amass nearly 30 hours of data
Yep most of the smaller fainter Hii emission targets do lack Oiii signal, it’s definitely there but no matter how much time you pour into Oiii the returns are lean.

Cheers
Martín

[Addos (Adam)]

Thanks Martin!

[strongmanmike (Michael)]

Yeah a lovely image Adam of an object rarely imaged from down here, is this taken from Brisbane?

I really like the colour palette and green does have a place in the mix for narrowband images, as does magenta, it's about the balance and I think you have got that right here

Mike

[alpal]

Hi Adam ,
that's a top picture and you've spent a lot of time, 29.5 hours.
I like your colour scheme -
it's different to this picture which is 69 hours.
https://apod.grag.org/2023/10/28/ngc-6820/


cheers
Allan

[Addos (Adam)]

Hi Mike - yep new huciendas is still in Brisbane Just dont have an 80 yr old tree two houses up from me anymore As I eluded to in my OP though, I lose west at 55-60 degrees across in all but the circumpolar regions, so its not all upsides



I think I've got my new custom landscape in Stellarium dialed in by the looks, the clear view to the north extends down to 16 degrees so Sadr region, North American Nebula and Andromeda are in play! Albeit maybe only 2-3 hrs per night, but still!


Thanks Allan, appreciated. That other photo is quite impressive especially with the large aperture hes playing with. In my research phase I came across this fellow's rendition and its my fave so far: https://www.astrobin.com/wkujwb/

[petershah (Peter Shah)]

thats a beautiful rendition