Scope: Megrez II f/4.1 Location: Dos Picos Park, Ramona, CA 14 Dec. 2004 Camera: ToUcam SC3
Exposure: 16 x 40 sec and 16 x 13 sec Luminance Exposure with IR Block filter. 6 x270 sec H-Alpha Exposure 9 x 40 sec RGB Exposures each frame for a 2 frame mosaic.
Processing: Images were captured in K3CCDTools 2. Aligned/stacked in Registax 3 and saved as FITS. Luminance and Color channels were scaled and rough color balanced in Astroart. Channels were co-registered in Astroart. The Nebulosity was extracted from HA and then combined with the 40 sec IR block for Luminance in Photoshop - The 13 sec IR block was used to minimize some star bloating. Luminance and Color FITS were combined in Photoshop with Luminance Layering. Color balancing and final touches in Photoshop. SGBNR (PixInsight LE) was used to smooth background noise on Luminance channel. After each frame was individually processed, they were mosaic combined in Photoshop. Edges were smoothed with a feathered masked combine of the underlying image - feathering gradient was parallel to the mosaic edge. Final result was very slightly minimum filtered to let the nebulosity stand out form the stars better. A very slight SGBNR (PixInsight LE) was used to smooth background noise on the final result. Image was resized to 800 x 980.
This image was taken at a semi dark site - the H-Alpha exposure provided some nebula detail. This was a guided image. This object is sometimes called the "Jellyfish Nebula" - the image was framed and oriented to help make the "jellyfish" more apparent. The bright star in the lower right is Propus. North is toward the upper right. Horizontal FOV is 50'.