Deep Lagoon

Post by **rcj** » Tue May 03, 2011 10:21 pm

Here is a new attempt at Lagoon in red light taken with the AP130. Combined with some old TOA data as well for inner core details. The idea was to bring out some of the surrounding dark absorptive nebulosity besides the popular red-head core, as well as the couple of Bok globules within. Core region had to be masked to also highlight the inner Hour-Glass nebula core.

Just wished got enough imaging time to capture the other channels.

Sivakis · Post by **Sivakis** » Tue May 03, 2011 10:40 pm

Unbelievable! An inspiration to all of us. Very very nice

Robin Lee · Post by **Robin Lee** » Tue May 03, 2011 11:40 pm

Fantastic! Would you mind to show what specific processing has been carried out to improve the faint details?

Post by **Airconvent** » Wed May 04, 2011 12:00 am

Gorgeous as usual Remus....And yes, I can see alot of fishes in there too!

Post by **rcj** » Wed May 04, 2011 10:21 pm

Robin: Lagoon is blazingly bright under dark skies....so like M42, the same approach of masking the core was done. Otherwise the core in Lagoon would be overwhelming and one will not be able to see the HourGlass nebula within. The peripheral absorption regions was processed in a way to avoid saturating the stars and yet bringing these faint parts. Cause sometimes stretching the image a lot to bring out these faint structures will result in "blotchy" stars that looks flat. So a mask was used to "delete" these stars and then stretching the remaining base image (which is just nebulosity). BTW, this image is not H-alpha...it was taken with a normal red filter, in the hope to gather data for blue and green, but had to be aborted due to clouds....

Robin Lee · Post by **Robin Lee** » Thu May 05, 2011 1:34 am

rcj wrote:Robin: Lagoon is blazingly bright under dark skies....so like M42, the same approach of masking the core was done. Otherwise the core in Lagoon would be overwhelming and one will not be able to see the HourGlass nebula within. The peripheral absorption regions was processed in a way to avoid saturating the stars and yet bringing these faint parts. Cause sometimes stretching the image a lot to bring out these faint structures will result in "blotchy" stars that looks flat. So a mask was used to "delete" these stars and then stretching the remaining base image (which is just nebulosity). BTW, this image is not H-alpha...it was taken with a normal red filter, in the hope to gather data for blue and green, but had to be aborted due to clouds....

Thanks for the information. There is another way to stretch the nebulosity without affecting the stars - Tone Mapping. Have you tried this? The initial procedures are probably the same, i.e. create a star mask. I haven't done much in this technique yet but I have seen this processing to be exceptionally useful on dark object such as supernova remnant.

http://astroanarchy.blogspot.com/2011/0 ... epsky.html

Come to Kahang again and collect more photons.