Hi all,
To go against the trend I've imaged a banana and not a chicken or a dragon. This is NGC 3199 in Carina. Although it's often called the Banana Nebula (and that's how it looks in broadband images), the Ha data clearly shows an asymmetric spherical shell of gas which has arisen from a central Wolf-Rayet star. I spent hours acquiring Ha, OIII and LRGB data hoping to showcase the spherical structure but found it very hard to do in HaLRGB. Here is what I ended up with (
large version onAstrobin) contrasted with the Ha data. Unfortunately though I ended up with a banana and not the result I was hoping for. I ended up not using the OIII data because it made it even more banana shaped.
I would be very interested to see how other people would process the data and would like to invite any or all to have a go. I have made the calibrated and stacked data available on
Google drive and I would like to invite anyone interested to download the data and have a go at processing. The only thing I ask is that the resulting image is added to this thread and processing techniques are discussed. I used exclusively PixInsight but if Photoshop, GIMP, AstroPixel Processor, Star Tools or anything else is used, it would be really good to hear what techniques are used.
I think the data are good and I look forward to seeing what images people can put together.
Cheers, Kevin
