I had already shot some Ha and OIII data over the past couple of nights with the Starlight Xpress SXVF H9 camera and I was hoping for some more clear weather but the clouds have come back in and then I am working for 4 nights so it will be at least until next week before I can shoot some SII. A good friend of mine Richard Crisp suggested it might be fun to try combining the SII data that I took with the Starlight Xpress SXVF H36 camera last year for a widefield shot of this region so I thought I'd give it a go and see what came out. This is the first time I've done this and I did it by cropping out a section of the widefield master frame for the SII and then aligned it with the Ha and OIII frames taken with the H9, this was done with Maxim DL. I then colour combined in Maxim DL with a weighting of 10:1:7 for SII:Ha:OIII, this may seem extreme but this was required to give equal signal and for the histograms to be roughly the same as each other. One iteration of levels was used followed by several minor 'S' shaped curves adjustments, with a final colour balancing and saturation reduction for the stars which understandably were a bit magentaish.
Just as a reminder for the details
Takahashi FSQ106Ed at f5
Paramount ME
9x30 minutes each for Ha and OIII with a Starlight Xpress SXVF H9 (1.4 megapixel with 6.45uM pixels)
8x30 minutes SII with a Starlight Xpress SXVF H36 (16 megapixel with 7.4uM pixels)
Although the image is a bit noisy I am quite pleased with the result, I will still shoot some SII data with the H9 when I get the chance to see if it will improve things. Again I have used no sharpening or noise reduction in the processing.
All three versions of this are now on the home page of my website http://www.imagingtheheavens.co.uk for comparison
Thanks for looking
Best wishes
Gordon
