A Steamy and Moody Ghost of Cassiopeia- HaLRGB (Chris White- Overcast Observatory)

A Steamy and Moody Ghost of Cassiopeia- HaLRGB

This was a fun an extremely challenging project. First of all, Gamma Cas is a BEAST of a star. Dealing with the light scatter and halo effect took some finesse. Additionally, I really wanted to take a different approach to this image than most I have seen. There is so much dust in this region as well as a very diffuse hydrogen alpha signal across the entire field around the main nebula itself.

Another major challenge that I ran into, is that this is also a very dense star field. As soon as you put any stretch on the stars, the subtle dusty structures are lost.

I took some artistic liberties here to achieve my goal. I pushed the dust really hard to bring it out. I also tamped the stars way down by only stretching them the tiniest bit. Then I blended some HA into the red channel to really saturate the nebula and to bring out the diffuse ha signal. The more I worked on this image the less I liked the final result. It was really a tough balance to create an image that achieved all of my goals while at the same time retaining a somewhat natural look to it. I generally try to go a little more natural, but with this target the moment I started pushing the dust I found I needed to push the saturation to avoid ending up with a washed out image.

So I went for art here instead. The result is what I call steamy and moody. I had fun with this, and I hope you enjoy it.

C&C welcome.

PS- There are some wonderful little structures in this area, and most are not captured at all. There are some nice little glob-like streaks coming in on the left side of the frame. Also some nice structure above and to the left of Gamma Cas. With such a huge FOV, it's fun to just scroll around at full zoom to discover the little gems.

Captured unguided with Mach2 Mount.

Original
C
D
Final
E

C

Description: What do you think of this. I gave the stars a little more "punch."

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D

Description: It turns out that some of my steaminess was just a gradient I had failed to neutralize. While processing another data set I stumbled across the effectiveness of extracting background on a starless image. It was an accident where I was using a starless image to place my DBE samples and just applied it to the image. I was shocked to see a totally different result and a MUCH more effective background extraction. In any event, the result is a bit cleaner . I gave the stars a little more punch and while the Halo on Gamma Cas was a miserable SOB, I am mostly happy with the image.

Uploaded: ...

E

Description: Forgot to put back in one small tweak to bring out the dark nebulae.

Uploaded: ...

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Status	Basic success
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Astrometry.net job	6534429
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A Steamy and Moody Ghost of Cassiopeia- HaLRGB

A Steamy and Moody Ghost of Cassiopeia- HaLRGB

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A Steamy and Moody Ghost of Cassiopeia- HaLRGB

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