2nd NGC7293 Helix Nebula

[Doogs38 (Alex)]

More mono learning fun; 1st (OSC) Helix was this time last year. After seeing John's (Oksa) recent RGB Helix I felt inspired as I thought the Helix was a purely NB target, not BB. So here is 11h 33m of Helix data which includes 7h 45m RGB and the remainder is Ha; the Ha was used as luminance and Ha proper. Twas integrated in APP and processed using PI's included noise reduction (TGV, MMT) and sharpening (deconv, MLT) tools and other histogram/curves tools ... final output had a light touch of NoiseX before some small tweaks in PS.

Love the cometary knots (globules) that are visible in the heart of the nebula. The background contains many little galaxies that some L data will (hopefully) bring out; I have more data to collect.

Details are: EdgeHD 8" with 0.7 R, ASI294MM, Antlia RGB, Optolong Ha

R - 54x180s = 2h 42mor
G - 54x180s = 2h 42m
B - 47x180s = 2h 21m
Ha - 76x180s = 3h 48m

Hi-res is here. Alex

[AstroViking (Steve)]

Damn, that's a great image on so many levels. (I was going to type something else but thought I'd get banned for dropping rude words in here...)

Can't wait to see what adding the 'L' to the mix will do...

Cheers,
V

[xelasnave]

Wow...fantastic.

Something I do ..which is naughty...and well also before I started doing flats etc..was to stack everything together and use that stack as my luminance...my recent Lagoon ( second more data attempt) I did that and the luminance came in at 10 hours something...I did that because I screwed up with some subs 300 seconds and some 120 seconds so doing flats etc seemed like too much work...anyways now you know.
So I guess I had some detail right there

You got the knots which is what it's all about with this object..well done.

alex

[Doogs38 (Alex)]

Thanks Steve. I say naughty words all the time but they are normal directed at PI :-)

Thank you too, Alex. I’ve actually used that little trick for faux L in some of my OSC previous images and it does seem to work In fact, even with real mono L I still use faux L for particular masks especially for noise reduction and sharpening in the linear stage. I roll the real L (or a Ha substitute) into the linear L/Ha/RGB image before starting too much processing. .

[Sunfish (Ray)]

Champion effort. One of the better Helix I have seen with a nice crisp star field , the full eyebrow and great colour.

[oska (John)]

Fantastic Alex. The palette is wonderful, peachy even. Easily my favourite target. An average one is good, not too easy and not too hard. The more you try the more there is. For 11 hours it's brilliant mate!
My earlier one was with the 2600mc from memory.

[Dave882 (David)]

That’s really really nice. To my eye you’ve integrated the Ha seamlessly and mate there’s so much detail it’s really a pleasure to take in. I agree that some lum may really bring out some of those background fuzzies. There’s heaps of them mixed in with the shells and I’d love to see how you go with that. Great work!