The Tarantula Nebula: A HaHOO image (Brian Boyle)

The Tarantula Nebula: A HaHOO image

A few days ago, I posted an image of the Tarantula nebula in four different palettes [Warhol's Tarantula].

In my view, the Foraxx HOO palette of the Tarantula was by far the most pleasing, and so I decided to see how additional data from Telescope Live might improve the image. The seeing from my own observatory is not great, and didn't really get as much time as I wanted on Ha and [OIII]. I was too busy taking useless [SII]*

So I simply added the Ha data from a Telescope Live one-click observation in a luminance layer to the Foraxx HOO combination from my own telescope. I have done this in the past with LRGB data, i.e. using Luminance from a large aperture telescope on a good seeing site, to add to RGB data taken at my own observatory. With Ha pseudo-luimance from Telescope Live and the Foraxx HOO palette from my own observations, I guess you could call this an HaHOO image.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this resulting in a big improvement in both the depth and the resolution of the image. I am quite pleased with the outcome of this little experiment, and although this simply adds another Tarantula image to the many excellent ones out there, I thought my AB friends might be interested in the slightly unusual route I took in creating it.

Once again, I would like to give full credit to TL for obtaining most of the photons...

23 x 600sec Ha CDK24

55 x 600s Ha RC8
23 x 600s [OIII] RC8

*Given how good the Foraxx HOO palette is, I am seriously considering whether I need to take [SII] ever again. Even the Foraxx SHO recipe gives, to my eye, too blue an image. The best I have managed is to swap the weighting of the Ha and [SII] in the red channel, but then I end up with a marginally inferior Foraxx HOO again.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	8652372
PixInsight job	IX5T14OO1VUN2NDZIGE1A6VXI7R67NZ5
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	05h38m48s.824
RA (top/left)	05h40m44s.780
RA (top/right)	05h36m54s.773
RA (bottom/right)	05h36m51s.134
RA (bottom/left)	05h40m44s.612

Dec (center)	-69°05′44″.75
Dec (top/left)	-68°55′27″.27
Dec (top/right)	-68°55′16″.98
Dec (bottom/right)	-69°15′57″.12
Dec (bottom/left)	-69°16′07″.59

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