This is always a favorite area of the sky to image due to the colorful and complex interaction of dust, bright starlight reflections, and hydrogen emission. Last year I imaged this exact same framing, with the same scope and camera, but from my San Diego suburban home and traveling to the local San Diego desert, and I liked the result. But now that I have a dual-FSQ setup in the excellent dark skies of southern New Mexico, I decided to go much deeper on the same framing as before. This is a 3 panel mosaic and initially I included the exposures from last year in the stacking process. However, since they were taken from much more light polluted skies those previous sub exposures were either weighted so low or rejected all together. So the final stacks were just the data from this year in New Mexico.
Image processing was mostly done in PixInsight with a normal LRGB process followed. I did continuum subtraction on the Ha and then stretched the LRGB and Ha in PI, but combined them in Photoshop as I like the extra control that I get with that process.
Of course my favorite area is the dustiest area in the middle. This image might be a little flat and bright to many, but there was a lot of interesting detail in the dark dust areas in this dataset and I didn't want it to just go black and lose that signal.
I reduced the image size by 50% from the full size image. The detail is there to support the full size, but the image becomes so large that it is a challenge to look around. There is even a small, bright, known Planetary Nebula near the right edge.
For the mouse-over, I have included the starless Luminance image. I was amazed at the dust coverage when I first stretched the starless Lum. Even though this is quite a large field of view, there is essentially 100% dust coverage with no "empty space" in the image.
Comments