this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2025
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Astrophotography

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[–] lefty7283@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Not to be confused with the butterfly planetary nebula, this is the one in Cygnus next to Sadr. I shot this thing years ago in SHO palette, but decided to shoot it again in Ha/Sii since there's very little Oiii in this region. Captured over a bunch of nights in November 2025 from a Bortle 9 zone.

Places where I host my other images:

Flickr | Pixelfed


Equipment:

  • TPO 6" F/4 Imaging Newtonian

  • Orion Sirius EQ-G

  • ZWO ASI1600MM-Pro

  • Skywatcher Quattro Coma Corrector

  • ZWO EFW 8x1.25"/31mm

  • Astronomik LRGB+CLS Filters- 31mm

  • Astrodon 31mm Ha 5nm, Oiii 3nm, Sii 5nm

  • Agena 50mm Deluxe Straight-Through Guide Scope

  • ZWO ASI-290mc for guiding

  • Moonlite Autofocuser

Acquisition: 22 hours 10 minutes (Camera at -15°C)

  • Ha - 59x600"

  • Sii - 74x600"

  • Darks- 30

  • Flats- 30 per filter

Capture Software:

  • Captured using N.I.N.A. and PHD2 for guiding and dithering.

PixInsight Preprocessing:

  • BatchPreProcessing

  • StarAlignment

  • Blink

  • ImageIntegration per channel

  • DrizzleIntegration (2x, Var β=1.5)

  • Dynamic Crop

Narrowband linear:

  • MultiscaleGradientCorrection using MARS project data (had to do good ol fashioned DBE for the Sii channel)

  • BlurXterminator

  • StarXterminator to completely remove stars (extracted stars processed separately)

  • STF applied via HistogramTransformation to stretch nonlinear

Stars Only:

  • Channel combination to combine stars images into color image

  • SpectrophotometricColorCalibration (Narrowband working mode)

  • HSV Repair

  • ArcsinhStretch + Histogram transformation to stretch nonlinear

  • Slight saturation curve boost

  • Stars only image saved for later addition

Nonlinear processing:

  • Pixelmath to combine stretched narrowband images into color image (HSS palette)

  • SCNR > Invert > SCNR > Invert to remove some greens and magentas

  • DeepSNR

  • Shitloads of curve transformations to adjust luminance, contrast, saturation, etc

  • LocalHistogramEqualization

  • more curves

  • NoiseX for some small scale chrominance noise reduction

  • Pixelmath to add in the stretched stars only image from earlier

    This basically re-linearizes the two images, adds them together, and then stretches them back to before. More info on it here)

    mtf(.005,

    mtf(.995,Stars)+

    mtf(.995,Starless))

  • Slight SCNR

  • Resample to 65%

  • Annotation