Friday, January 22, 2010
IC 410, a cosmic fertilization
HST-palette
Natural color composition from Narrowband channels.
After many technical and weather problems I managed to get enough data for this image.
IC 410 is a beautiful object next to a "Flaming Star Nebula", IC 405, in Auriga.
Ambient temperature was about -21 celsius degrees and the transparency was good.
Seeing was really bad all night long, about 5 FWHM, so I shot H-alpha frames binned 2x2 to have a image scale of 1,5 arcseconds/pixel.
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Processing work flow:
Image acquisition, MaxiDL v5.07.
Stacked and calibrated in CCDStack.
Deconvolution with a CCDSharp, 30 iterations.
Levels, curves and color combine in PS CS3.
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Telescope, Meade LX200 GPS 12" @ f5
Camera, QHY9
Guiding, SXV-AO @ 8Hz
Image Scale, 1,5 arcseconds/pixel
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Exposures:
H-alpha 7x1200s Binned 2x2
O-III 4x600s, binned 3x3
S-II 3x600s, binned 3x3
A starless image of the IC 410. This looks now like a Rococo painting, very 3D!
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4 comments:
J-P
As always, your work is an inspiration; technically, artistically, your images excite the imagination. Please, keep it up!
Cheers,
Steve W (Tucson, AZ)
Thanks a lot Steve!
Awesome as always J-P. I'm actually working on IC410 myself at the moment though I'm doubting mine will come out as nicely as yours has. I have used your tone mapping technique in the past and very much like it given that my ST2000XM isn't all that sensitive. A few questions for you; do you find that binning your SII and OIII data helps with the finished image given that you yourself use the tonemapping technique? I see that you use subs half as long as your HA subs. Is the binning used because your subs are half as long, or is it simply a higher sensitivity thing?
I too am fighting the winter here in Canada and there's a lot of grey skies. If I can truly get away with binned OIII and SII data with half the time spent exposing, it might work much better going forward.
Cheers,
Chris
Hi and thanks Chris!
Being able to use binning is a one of the major adwance of monochrome CCD.
I usually shoot H-a binned 1x1, if seeing supports it. if there is bad seeing, there is not any point to oversample too much, so I use 2x2 binning, like in this image.
If there is not much high resolution details in other channels, like there usually isn't, I use 3x3 binning mode or even 4x4! QHY9 has about 9meg pixels, so there is enough them left in different bin modes.
(I scale binned channels match to H-a after stacking them)
Binnig increase sensitivity a lot!
Binned 3x3 is about nine times more sensitive, than 1x1.
I will test a new method soon.
There the H-a is shot partly bin 1x1 mode and partly lower modes. The final combination has high S/N details from a bin 1x1 image and low S/N objects, like a dim background nebulosity etc..., from binned material.
I'll publish this after tests.
Weather is very volatile up here, so I have to use creative meyhods to be able to have enough data.
Br.
J-P
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