While I was waiting for the Edge HD11 to come in I decided to try my hand at narrowband imaging and processing in the Hubble Pallet. For those of you that aren't familiar with that its when you put filters for Ha (Hydrogen Alpha), S2 (Sulfur 2) and O3 (Oxygen 3) in-front of a mono camera and take equal amount of images for each filter. So that means each image takes 3 times as long to capture. Then once you have all the images from each filter stacked you combine it into a false color image where normally an image uses Red Green Blue (RGB) you map the S2 image to Red, the Ha to Green and O3 to Blue. Not only does this add a lot to the processing time it also gives a lot more "artistic" decision to how the image looks.
I first started off trying to switch filters on each target but that really slowed my imaging down and caused me to be a lot more attentive to the imaging session. This is challenging on the RASA 8 because you can't use a filter wheel so you have to go down, pull the filter drawer in-front of the camera, unscrew the filter and replace it with the new one. It works but it just means that I can't set it up and go do normal life things. So then I tried choosing multiple targets, and shooting all the Ha for one night, and then shooting all of the S2 the next night and finally O3 for a night. That was good except now I have a massive backlog of images to process.
Then I got into the processing, which is a lot of work and much more artistic than my engineering brain wants to handle. But I again watched a lot of YouTube videos on how to process them and finally ended up with this of the Rosette Nebula. I'm very happy with it even though its not the standard Hubble Pallet.
Blue Waters and Dark Skies
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