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Picture

 

IC1396 Elephant Trunk Nebula in Narrowband Hubble Palette

12/9/2016

2 Comments

 
​With ​60 hours of imaging over, I have gathered all the data I set out to gather for the IC1396 Elephant Trunk Nebula image in Narrowband Hubble Palette. This image involved a 4-panel mosaic with 10 exposures per filter, per panel. All exposures were 30 minutes long, captured with Sulphur-II, Hydrogen-Alpha and Oxygen-III​ 3nm filters. The following is the end result:
Picture
→ View on AstroBin
→ View on Flickr
​The above end result required a refined narrowband image post-processing workflow in PixInsight. This made use of the exceptional work by Rick S. from the PixInsight forums, who made the ColorMask script. This script is able to produce a mask image from a range of colour hue values, thereby selecting out specific colours for post-processing. I personally think it is worth mentioning use of this script in the tutorial about touching up colour in narrowband images, so it will happen soon enough. 
2 Comments
Jack Mogren link
29/9/2016 02:45:06

Beautiful work Kayron. Can you tell me, do you use the Gibraltar Astronomical Society's optimum exposure calculator to decide upon exposure times? I tried it during one of my recent sessions and I thought I got pretty good results. But I see your times are pretty long. So either you have exceptional skies or you use some other method to decide this.

Reply
Kayron Mercieca link
17/10/2016 23:07:11

Hi Jack,

Thanks for your comment. I'm glad the optimum exposures calculator has been giving you good results. I tried to make sure that would be the case. Indeed for this I haven't used any help at all - I just decided 30 minute exposures would be by top exposure time and worth-while doing for 3nm narrowband images.

Mind you, if I do use the calculator for this, given the 3nm bandwidth of my narrowband filters and the exceptionally dark sky at e-EyE (where I have my equipment hosted remotely), I would probably get recommended exposure times longer than 30 minutes if I want 95% of maximum SNR or so. Alas, even if a 60 minute exposure is somewhat better, the SNR boost would not be as significant as it would for me to capture double the number of exposures in that time, for stacking later. It's a game of compromise!

Best Regards,
Kayron

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