Thanks for your kind comments, Dietmar.
decay wrote: ↑Wed Jan 22, 2025 5:45 pm
The flame is nicely coloured - I think I remember a thread where colour was off after using NBAccent.
Yes, I also remembered that one. Which was the reason I initially didn't want to "waste" precious clear sky time on the flame with duo NB. I finished the horse head with broadband only and went on to the Cone. But then I was reminded how much there was to gain when I saw this Ha only image acquired during a bright moon...
https://www.astrobin.com/8jni76/
Insane
And then with one more night of clear sky to come I thought it might be worth a shot.
I don't know why it didn't came out purely red... It actually had this color straight out of the camera. I could see this already in the incoming individual subs in NINA. I always thought the flame would lose its unique color when filtered with duo NB. Maybe the band width of the l-eNhance is too big for this to happen and there's quite some continuum signal in there.
decay wrote: ↑Wed Jan 22, 2025 5:45 pm
Alnitak is well under control, but maybe a bit desaturated, as well as some of the other stars? Anyway, this draws the eye to the superb colours of the nebulae.
Well spotted. Normally my star fields are pretty colorful. But here I basically omitted almost every step which increased saturation. Also no Saturate preset in SuperStructure. It always looked like too much in this case. In color I used the Artistic preset which naturally decreases the bright Alnitak (but for quite some time now I almost always use this preset but stars get saturation later on...but not in this case). In Shrink I was quite extreme here. I liked the result with the Tighten preset but thought more might be better here...so after the first Shrink run I entered the module again but now I used Dim. That's certainly a matter of taste but I liked how it brought up the nebula. Since there's so much gas and dust I find the star field in this region looks pretty uniform anyway so I considered it to not be a big sacrifice here.
Maybe noteworthy: Since I used the 13 or 14 bit tranches during stretching to get Alnitak under control the rest of the image went pretty dark. So I pulled up gamma to 1.3 or so. It was also much brighter than the initial stretch by OptiDev. Usually my data cannot carry such a stretch and gets noisy and blotchy but here it looked fine. Problem was that then NBAccent didn't work since the broadband image was brighter than the duo NB and so almost nothing of the duo NB data contributed (everything was black in Stage 1 of NBAccent). So I had to get back to the initial stretch of broadband, avoid pushing gamma, go back to NBAccent and do it and then push up gamma. Never had to do that back and forth.
decay wrote: ↑Wed Jan 22, 2025 5:45 pm
Lately I also cleaned the mirrors of my scope, but I struggled a bit with collimation. Well - yes, as Jochen lately stated this is a "wobbly 8" Newtonian" and such problems may be by nature.
Newtonians, right
decay wrote: ↑Wed Jan 22, 2025 5:45 pm
I hope there will be a few clear hours for me too. Now I have to collect NB data of the horse, of course!
Good luck, certainly rewarding though it's not high up. For me no clear skies for the next week.
Regards
Stefan
That would have probably turned out differently with a f4 device.
The flame is nicely coloured - I think I remember a thread where colour was off after using NBAccent. 