TheSkySearchers

A new month and a new AP Processing Challenge!

Starfield Steve has submitted his three narrow band Ha, Oiii and Sii capture files of the Rosette Nebula, C49. This nebula is a collection of NGCs.

Wikipedia: The Rosette Nebula is an H II region located near one end of a giant molecular cloud in the Monoceros region of the Milky Way Galaxy. The cluster and nebula lie at a distance of 5,000 light-years from Earth and measure roughly 130 light years in diameter. The open cluster NGC 2244 is closely associated with the nebulosity, the stars of the cluster having been formed from the nebula's matter. The complex has the following New General Catalogue (NGC) designations:
NGC 2237 – Part of the nebulous region (Also used to denote whole nebula)
NGC 2238 – Part of the nebulous region
NGC 2239 – Part of the nebulous region (Discovered by John Herschel)
NGC 2244 – The open cluster within the nebula (Discovered by John Flamsteed in 1690)
NGC 2246 – Part of the nebulous region

Just click the link below to download Steve's files and process using your preferred software and methods. Then post your results to this thread for us all to enjoy!

AP Processing Challenge No.15 files: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

This is Steve's original posting: viewtopic.php?f=66&t=16533&p=138886#p138886

Big thank you to Steve for submitting his excellent data.

Please keep the submissions coming in for future challenges.

Just send a PM to a Mod or an email to: tssapchallenge@theskysearchers.com

Have fun!

Regards

Graeme

Hope you all have as much fun with this data set as I did. I've used it to explore different HOO and SHO treatments, different tone mapping combinations, and looked at different ways to crop it to highlight different areas. I've learned a ton working with this as it's only my second set of narrowband data. One tip I found in working with it - the SI signal adds nice highlights to the nebulosity so it's worth boosting that a bit

Here are the details:

Each master is built from 45 subs shot at 301 gain at 300 seconds.
Used a 290mm camera in it's original 2X2 binned configuration on a 550ml Esprit 100.
Used Astronomiks 6nm HA, O3, and SII filters
Stacked in PI
Data was capture over 3 nights from 2/7-2/16

Enjoy

That looks like fantastic data. I'm off to download it now and hopefully get some time at it tomorrow.

Thanks for putting it up.

Jockinireland wrote: ↑Sat Mar 20, 2021 5:39 pm That looks like fantastic data. I'm off to download it now and hopefully get some time at it tomorrow.

Thanks for putting it up.

Yeah, it was pretty clean considering it was shot from borttle 7-8 skies.

Hi Graeme, Steve

Thank you guys ever so much. It was a joy to work on this one.

I opened the three images in Fitswork and let it combine them to an RGB which I saves as a 16 bit Tiff. All I did in Fitswork was move the sliders of the histogram a bit. In PS I subtracted a green to transparent gradient to get rid of a green cast that showed on the left side. That was about it, except that I worked on the colours and reduced the image to 1000px high.

I actually did a lot of work on the colours, aiming for a tasteful palette, but I could not help myself and instead I produced this totally awesome result.
Thanks again!

First of, thanks Steve @starfield for making such wonderful data available. It is super clean to the extent that there really was not much processing required.

So, rather than just do a different colour scheme I thought, since the data was so nice, I'd crop in on the part of the Rosette that fascinates me and try to really highlight the Bok's gobules and the other features in that area.

So my process was in Pixinsight and consisted of;

On individual mono'
Crop, Deconvolution, Noise reduction with EZnoise (not Ha as there was NO NOISE there), Stretched with HT (masked on the Sii to keep stars small), tweaked contrast with CT, combined with a pretty standard SHO pallete in SHO-AIP, some boosts on sat and contrast, took that into Photoshop and did a selective high pass routine to pull out the various details without increasing the noise. And that was it! Giving this.. I'm not sure why the donkey is more fuzzy than the others in the "menagerie". Maybe just could not stand still

I'm probably going to have another go at it - maybe with the whole frame. But for the time being, thanks for the fantastic data - shows me what I need to be aiming for in terms of acquisition.

Hi all this is my result using Steves data,I used the ha as red,03 as green and s11 as blue.I used Adobe cs2 to convert to rgb and my light pollution software.I then used curves in Affinity to bring out the detail in a luminosity layer and merged together,I used the clarity tool to make it sharper.I finally used the tool to darken the background and ended up with this image.The image is a bit different to Steves oringinal and thanks for the data to use.

needs a little more sii

Jockinireland wrote: ↑Mon Mar 22, 2021 4:33 pm First of, thanks Steve @starfield for making such wonderful data available. It is super clean to the extent that there really was not much processing required.

So, rather than just do a different colour scheme I thought, since the data was so nice, I'd crop in on the part of the Rosette that fascinates me and try to really highlight the Bok's gobules and the other features in that area.

So my process was in Pixinsight and consisted of;

On individual mono'
Crop, Deconvolution, Noise reduction with EZnoise (not Ha as there was NO NOISE there), Stretched with HT (masked on the Sii to keep stars small), tweaked contrast with CT, combined with a pretty standard SHO pallete in SHO-AIP, some boosts on sat and contrast, took that into Photoshop and did a selective high pass routine to pull out the various details without increasing the noise. And that was it! Giving this..

I'm not sure why the donkey is more fuzzy than the others in the "menagerie". Maybe just could not stand still

I'm probably going to have another go at it - maybe with the whole frame. But for the time being, thanks for the fantastic data - shows me what I need to be aiming for in terms of acquisition.

this is very nice, has a nice Turquoise teal colour to the oiii with the magenta stars shifted to a natural colour

yobbo89 wrote: ↑Fri Mar 26, 2021 7:23 pm needs a little more sii

Is it ever possible to get too much SII...

Now that was fun!!!

It's great to have some really, REALLY good data!
All processing done in StarTools:

--- Auto Develop

--- Bin

--- Crop

--- Wipe

--- Photographic Film Development Emulation

--- Contrast

--- HDR

--- Wavelet Sharpen

--- SNR-aware Wavelet Sharpening

There are some excellent submissions on the is one! Here's my go.

I pulled in the three files as layers in Gimp with S2 to Blue, O3 to Green and Ha to Red. Did the usual Curves and Levels, didn't need much, the data is good! Colour balanced and pulled up the saturation.

Then I started playing with the % opacity on each level. As an OSC camera user I'm as lost as a needle in a haystack with layer % opacity! I left the bottom Red layer at 100% and the put the mid layer on 45% on Green and top layer on 8% on the Blue. What would be a more traditional convention?


Regards

Graeme

Jockinireland wrote: ↑Mon Mar 22, 2021 4:33 pm So, rather than just do a different colour scheme ........

What files do you allocate to which RGB colour to get the standard Hubble palette David?

Regards

Graeme

Graeme1858 wrote: ↑Thu Apr 01, 2021 5:23 am

Jockinireland wrote: ↑Mon Mar 22, 2021 4:33 pm So, rather than just do a different colour scheme ........

What files do you allocate to which RGB colour to get the standard Hubble palette David?

Regards

Graeme

Hi Graeme,

So on this one it was Sii-R, Ha=G, Oiii=B. If I remember right I put a little of the Oiii (maybe 10%) into G and a little Ha (8%) into B. I will play around a bit with mixing the data in the different channels using PI's SHO-AIP script to get to the colour scheme that I find pleasing.

Rgds

David.

Thanks David.

I'll have another go with Sii-R, Ha=G, Oiii=B and see how it turns out.

Perhaps a move from Gimp to PI would be in order!

Regards

Graeme

I haven't tried a Processing Challenge in quite awhile. I have to say, Steve this is the finest data I have ever worked with!

I am relatively new to PI (probably will be for some time) and this data looked good with just a STF stretch! I really didn't know what to do with the Ha, O, and S channels, so I found a pleasant (my take on natural looking) coloration by mapping the Ha to red, and O to both the green and blue channels in ChannelCombination. I guess that makes it a HOO? I really have no idea.

This was a super easy process (I am sure that it could be even much better) that took really no effort with.

Thanks Steve @starfield for the opportunity to experience working with primo data! I hope that I did it some justice!

Lovely contributions.

Looking forward to what April will bring!

It's been fun to see what you all have come up with. The data here surprised me. I was lucky and had a two week stretch of great transparency and low humidity which helped lessen the effects of my nasty light pollution. I think part of what helps too is that this object is really bright. My brief experience in narrowband seems to be that the brighter the object, the easier everything gets. Strong signal means less stretching, which means you end up exposing fewer gradients and calibration goobers. Maybe next year I'll try shooting this in 45mp mode and what kind of cropping I can do with it.

For April, we could all work on today's APOD data from Loof!

Ruud wrote: ↑Thu Apr 01, 2021 10:00 pm Lovely contributions.

Looking forward to what April will bring!

Excellent contributions indeed!

Still waiting for someone to submit some data for April, so this one is still open. Feel free to have another go with some different colour mapping!

Regards

Graeme

Jockinireland wrote: ↑Thu Apr 01, 2021 8:25 am So on this one it was Sii-R, Ha=G, Oiii=B.....

Well I gave that configuration a go:


Thanks David.

Regards

Graeme