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:
-
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